February 21, 2003
Cutting Through the Crowd-Size Cloud
I am traveling today and didn't intend to post, but felt compelled to put up a quick pointer to the excellent examination by the San Francisco Chronicle of the crowd size at last weekend's anti-war protest. [Read The Numbers Game].
The Chronicle hired an aerial survey company to take high-resolution photographs of the protest as its peak and concluded the march and rally against war in Iraq drew about 65,000 people instead of the 200,000 estimated by police and organizers.
At a time when emotions are running hot on all sides of the political spectrum - with conservatives in particular attacking the press for being too soft on protest organizers --
the Chronicle did exactly what a good newspaper should do: Take whatever steps are necessary to get at the truth.
[Thanks to MediaMinded for the pointer to OpinionJournal].
Links
San Francisco Chronicle Photos show 65,000 at peak of S.F. rally
San Francisco Chronicle Using aerial photography to estimate the size of Sunday's peace march in S.F.
I knew it was not much more than 50,000 but didn't want to acknowledge that for fear a Republican was eavesdropping
What does that say that in SF they couldn't get out at least 100,000...interesting.
Posted by: deborah on February 21, 2003 12:09 PM