I looked first to see what the New York Times reported, a source I believe to be generally objective, and was disappointed to find that it said "thousands," an estimate I find vague and unhelpful. "Thousands" could mean anywhere from 2,000 to a million. Beyond that, it seems like the numbers depend largely on one's political orientation. Glen Beck, Fox and ABC apparently gave the highest tallies, and government workers the lowest.
Politifact goes on to describe a misleading photo which was purportedly of the crowd on Saturday, but turns out to be a shot of the Promise Keepers' rally in 1997. This rally covered the vast expanse from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, while other pictures of the 9/12 protest showed significantly less acreage. The event has been widely discussed on the internet, but the disparities of reporting make me nostalgic for the heyday of newspapers.
The trouble with the internet is that we tend to go to sites that we like and that we agree with, and we get a lot of our news from them. This news is usually slanted in directions we approve of, and can eventually give us a false sense of important issues and public opinion. In addition, photoshopping and other techniques have allowed photos to be doctored to a point where it becomes impossible to be sure of the images we see. While newspapers never created a consensus they did offer a version of events that all readers could use as a starting point, and pictures that were less easily tampered with.
Still, it seems to me that reasonably precise estimates of crowds could be made by anyone with a helicopter. If you know approximately what number of people are in a given segment of the picture, then multiplying that amount by the number of segments should give you a good idea of attendance. Though there were variations in the estimates of the crowd at Obama's inauguration, they covered a smaller range of possibilities than the wildly differing numbers given of Saturday's march.
So that leads me to the question: why does it matter how many people there were? After all, even 2 million people are hardly a majority even of the people who voted in last November's election. The answer, I think, is that two thousand people can represent many more who just didn't have the time, means or energy to travel in order to attend themselves. Two million protesters can represent how many more? A two-million-sized gathering represents quite a bit of discontent in the country.
It has been alleged that many of the attendees at the Tea Party 9/12 rally are bought and paid for by the insurance companies and big pharma. Certainly Freedomworks, a political group funded by corporate interests, has been active, especially behind the scenes, in much of the agitation at this summer's town hall meetings, in funding a number of political ads, and at Saturday's demonstration. There is no doubt that powerful interests are dedicated to undermining this president and his administration and opposing any changes to the status quo.
I also believe that many conscientious, patriotic and hard-working people are being manipulated through fear and false representations of the facts.
My greatest hope is that fear, hatred, rabble-rousing and emotional manipulation can be replaced by reasoned dialogue between those who advocate for positive change and those who want everything to stay the same. If we are all reduced to the political equivalent of food fights we all will be losers.
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