Quick recap:
On Saturday, March 21st 2009, thousands of people gathered in DC to march on the Pentagon for peace. However, some people in the media felt the need to blatantly lie about the size of the crowd, claiming it was as low as a "few hundred."
Using footage, captured from a bridge as the march went by underneath, we estimated the size of the crowd. The footage, which was not of the entire crowd, clearly showed that these reports were severely low in their estimates. The process for estimating crowd size is an incredibly easy one. It is, literally, middle school difficulty math. As I said before:
First, you single out a small section. You want to use as large a section as possible with the constraints of time and ability to count all the people. You count how many people are in that block. You can then count how many times that block is represented by the entire crowd. There is obviously a margin of error, but it is actually quite accurate.The fact that these news organizations neglected to take the small amount of time necessary to produce an accurate estimate is not surprising or important. What is important, is that these organizations reported a crowd estimate knowing full well that they had no idea what the real number was. They could have simply not reported a number. Since they did report one, without knowing if it was accurate, they were lying.
Here at Left Chattering, we estimated the size to be, at a minimum, 3,250 people.
And here is Left Chattering's latest video, which includes the footage we used to estimate the crowd size:
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