The crowds were overwhelming. If you saw the aerials on the Drudge Report this weekend, there was an aerial photo.... Unofficially, off-the-record we talked we talked to one of the guys from the National Park Police who told us he thought it was 1.6 million. There had to be over a million people there. People were packed in from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.
A crowd-counting expert:
My estimate is that about 80,000 people were at the rally. Ryan Shuler, an Airphotoslive image analyst, used the same images and a different grid-density method to produce an estimate of 87,000. Considering the error margins around our separately-calculated estimates, they are statistically identical. CBS went with the 87,000 figure, which I certainly can accept.
Now the fun begins in the blogosphere. NBC News, the New York Times, and other large media outlets that didn’t attempt a scientific estimate uncritically accepted Beck’s claim of “300,000 to 500,000″. (At least Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s laughable claim of 1 million isn’t being treated seriously.)
No comments:
Post a Comment