Posted on 09/14/2009 9:05:22 PM PDT by GVnana
Reporting from Washington - A sea of angry taxpayers marched on the Capitol on Saturday afternoon. That much is certain. But even before the march was over, the news media, bloggers and rally supporters were wrangling over the crowd count, with estimates ranging from 60,000 to 2 million.
The Daily Mail in England initially reported that 1 million people flooded the west lawn of the Capitol, protesting what they called the dangerous big government policies of President Obama. Some conservative blogs claimed 2 million attendees.
The two groups that sponsored the event offered more modest but widely varying numbers. Pete Sepp, a National Taxpayers Union spokesman, said the group estimated the crowd at 75,000 in the morning and from 200,000 and 300,000 as the day went on. FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon put his "conservative" estimate at 600,000 to 800,000 after comparing photographs of Saturday's protest with previous events.
-snip-
El-Baz said the only accurate way to measure attendance is by counting heads in a photograph taken from an airplane or satellite, an expensive undertaking. No such photo was taken Saturday, to El-Baz's knowledge. Airspace over the National Mall is restricted.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
This appears to be the source of O'Reilly's number, and it's about as useful as my broken flipflop.
This is what the LA Times would like to report: There were only 10 people at the rally. The videos are all doctored, the photo stills are fake. Actually, nothing happened in DC on the 12th. Nothing. The place was empty.
Farouk El-Baz?
"..Politifact, a nonpartisan journalistic fact-checking organization, checked in on Monday with Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the DC Fire and Emergency Department. Piringer “unofficially” estimated that between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up..."
The above is where O'Reilly got his number. He said the estimate was from the DC Fire Department on the program.
It’s an honest error. They counted the buses. There were probably 40,000 buses there. At the average ridership of most public transportation systems - that would make the total less thna 80,000.
So, by those metrics 75K is reasonable.
By any other metric - it’s ubsurd.
That's not exactly true -- it's LAZY. We have the overhead video of the march. I'm sure the "experts" would prefer a static group of people, BUT it's completely realistic to develop an average number per block on Pennsylvania, per minute, the videos show the speed at which they were marching (which was quite rapid IMHO.)
Here's a shot of the crowd density during the march from FReeper Biggirl:
Now we need the distances.
Not a valid comparison. Freepers would pay for the ride.
Well, Metro usually releases stats after special events, such as 4th of July or inaugurations, to show how their service handled a large crowd of passengers. I’m surprised they haven’t released the numbers yet.
I was there. When I arrived at the Capital building the fairly densely packed crowd (I would estimate 2000 per acre) extended from the Capital steps to the street, a distance of about 500 yards. The crowd was at least 4 hundred yards wide. The crowd surrounded the reflecting pool and filled all of the grassy area that wasn’t fenced off. Eventually, the crowd filled in a good portion of the fenced off area as well. When I arrived, having walked up Pennsylvania Avenue from Freedom Square, the crowd behind me extended far down the street. I would estimate the number at somewhere over one million.
Ever since Calypso Louie and his merry band of race pimps beat down the National Park Service for accurately estimating the Million Man March at about 400K and change, official crowd counts were toast. The photos tell the story the press won’t. Hundreds of thousands of patriots shut down DC on Saturday. So who are you going to believe O Really? and the MSM or your lyin’ eyes....
Distance: 1.6 miles from the White House to the Capitol.
If O'Reilly needs a new word, he has been behaving "panglossian" in his approach to all things Obama.
-PJ
My gut says you're right, but to confirm it, we need the number of people in a shot from the overhead video and the size of the space they occupied. Based on the march photo I provided, we could develop an estimate of the number of people in each line. Even with the distance of one block we could multiply that total to achieve a realistic estimate of march attendees.
With that number we can compare to the size of the areas in the USA Today estimates. With a little help we could get this done, and done well. But I'd love to connect with someone who has the math skills to do it!
Cool. That’s a start. I’d estimate an average of 20 people per line across the avenue.
Again, I was there. Later that afternoon at the hotel we were watching a football game on TV and the announcer said there were 106,000 people in attendance. I looked at my husband there were at least 3x that many people at the march.
Wikipedia says 1.9 miles from White House to Capitol.
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