Size matters-Tea Baggin by Millions! LIARS
Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2009 6:43 pm
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"With headlines that said the rally organized by the conservative group FreedomWorks drew as many as 2 million people, the photo showed a sea of protesters that stretched more than a mile from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Conservative blog postings and Facebook updates said the media was unfairly reporting much smaller numbers.
The meme went viral on Twitter, and pictures of huge crowds were posted widely on conservative blogs.
..............
"'Media' estimates range from 60,000 to 500,000 to around 2 million (yes, 2,000,000)," wrote John G. Winder for the conservative blog Cypress Times.
....
The New York Times reported that "thousands" of protesters "filled the west lawn of the Capitol
"It was an impressive crowd," he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol the crowd "only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street," he said.
Yet the photo showed the crowd sprawling far beyond that to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets.
There's another big problem with the photograph: It doesn't include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth Street and Independence Avenue that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn't show the "tea party" crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.
Also worth noting are the cranes in front of the Natural History Museum (the second building from the lower left of the National Mall). According to Randall Kremer, the museum's director of public affairs, "The last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the IMAX theater was being built."
That makes the picture at least a decade old."
It may be a real photograph, but it does not depict the much smaller crowd that showed up for the protest. We rate it Pants on Fire!
UPDATE: We've received reader e-mails all day telling us that the rally featured in the photograph was organized in 1997 by the Promise Keepers, a group for Christian men.
More estimates on the REAL crowd from PolitiFact. com
Columbia Journalism Review Gets Real, TOTAL MYTH:
This is not an insignificant thing. Size matters—in political rallies, in particular, for which attendance numbers are, to a large degree, the whole point. Nobody understands this better, generally, than the organizers of those rallies. Which is possibly why Matt Kibbe—president of FreedomWorks, the organization that mobilized Saturday’s protest—declared to the crowd assembled before the Capitol that, per the estimates of ABC News, rally participants numbered between 1 and 1.5 million people. Yes, million. And possibly why protest attendee Tabitha Hale, casually rounding up Kibbe’s number by between 500,000 people and a million or so people, mentioned it—multiple times—in her Twitter feed. And why Michelle Malkin linked Hale’s inflated estimate. And why, in turn, Newsbusters and Right Pundits and Wizbang and Brutally Honest and the San Francisco Examiner, among others, linked to it. Culminating in, among others, the following utterly ridiculous headline (emphasis mine): “Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama’s spending in ‘tea-party’ demonstration.”
Yeah. “Teeny, tiny fringe, huh?” Malkin scoffed. “Wow,” Hale sniffed. “Y’all flipped over that 2 million number. Too bad it’s true.”
But, of course, true it was not. Consider, after all, that an estimated 1.8 million people—fewer people than Hale’s cavalier tea party estimate—attended Barack Obama’s inauguration. Consider, as well, dispatches from reporters in DC. (Nico Pitney: “I’d put crowd at 10-20k. Only crowded area is b/w Capitol and 3rd. First part of mall is 1/4 full.” David Schuster: “I’ve covered rallies at dc capitol for 20 years. When the crowd goes only as far as 3rd st, it is 50,000 or less.”) Consider the aerial pictures of the 9/12 protests—which depict a healthy crowd, to be sure, but nothing remotely suggestive of seven figures.
And consider that ABC News never reported that the protest had over a million participants.
Yeah. As ABC’s Yunji de Nies, who spent Saturday on the ground in DC reporting on the rally, tweeted on Saturday afternoon, “Tweeps, I’m confused. Keep hearing ppl say ‘ABC news is reporting 2 million’ - where is this coming from? have not heard anyone say that.” (Later, she elaborated: “I don’t know where those numbers are coming from, but there’s no way there were 2 million there.” And, a bit later: “for the record, park police and capitol police do NOT give crowd estimates. so far @dcfireems is the only official agency to release #s.” And, a bit later: ““have checked all of our coverage - ABC never reported 2 million. if you find it, send it to me. this is a total myth.”)
Rest of the outing here
There you are Galt, fake pictures, fake statistics, fake facts, false assumptions, and FAUX NEWS.
.
.
"With headlines that said the rally organized by the conservative group FreedomWorks drew as many as 2 million people, the photo showed a sea of protesters that stretched more than a mile from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Conservative blog postings and Facebook updates said the media was unfairly reporting much smaller numbers.
The meme went viral on Twitter, and pictures of huge crowds were posted widely on conservative blogs.
..............
"'Media' estimates range from 60,000 to 500,000 to around 2 million (yes, 2,000,000)," wrote John G. Winder for the conservative blog Cypress Times.
....
The New York Times reported that "thousands" of protesters "filled the west lawn of the Capitol
"It was an impressive crowd," he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol the crowd "only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street," he said.
Yet the photo showed the crowd sprawling far beyond that to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets.
There's another big problem with the photograph: It doesn't include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth Street and Independence Avenue that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn't show the "tea party" crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.
Also worth noting are the cranes in front of the Natural History Museum (the second building from the lower left of the National Mall). According to Randall Kremer, the museum's director of public affairs, "The last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the IMAX theater was being built."
That makes the picture at least a decade old."
It may be a real photograph, but it does not depict the much smaller crowd that showed up for the protest. We rate it Pants on Fire!
UPDATE: We've received reader e-mails all day telling us that the rally featured in the photograph was organized in 1997 by the Promise Keepers, a group for Christian men.
More estimates on the REAL crowd from PolitiFact. com
Columbia Journalism Review Gets Real, TOTAL MYTH:
This is not an insignificant thing. Size matters—in political rallies, in particular, for which attendance numbers are, to a large degree, the whole point. Nobody understands this better, generally, than the organizers of those rallies. Which is possibly why Matt Kibbe—president of FreedomWorks, the organization that mobilized Saturday’s protest—declared to the crowd assembled before the Capitol that, per the estimates of ABC News, rally participants numbered between 1 and 1.5 million people. Yes, million. And possibly why protest attendee Tabitha Hale, casually rounding up Kibbe’s number by between 500,000 people and a million or so people, mentioned it—multiple times—in her Twitter feed. And why Michelle Malkin linked Hale’s inflated estimate. And why, in turn, Newsbusters and Right Pundits and Wizbang and Brutally Honest and the San Francisco Examiner, among others, linked to it. Culminating in, among others, the following utterly ridiculous headline (emphasis mine): “Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama’s spending in ‘tea-party’ demonstration.”
Yeah. “Teeny, tiny fringe, huh?” Malkin scoffed. “Wow,” Hale sniffed. “Y’all flipped over that 2 million number. Too bad it’s true.”
But, of course, true it was not. Consider, after all, that an estimated 1.8 million people—fewer people than Hale’s cavalier tea party estimate—attended Barack Obama’s inauguration. Consider, as well, dispatches from reporters in DC. (Nico Pitney: “I’d put crowd at 10-20k. Only crowded area is b/w Capitol and 3rd. First part of mall is 1/4 full.” David Schuster: “I’ve covered rallies at dc capitol for 20 years. When the crowd goes only as far as 3rd st, it is 50,000 or less.”) Consider the aerial pictures of the 9/12 protests—which depict a healthy crowd, to be sure, but nothing remotely suggestive of seven figures.
And consider that ABC News never reported that the protest had over a million participants.
Yeah. As ABC’s Yunji de Nies, who spent Saturday on the ground in DC reporting on the rally, tweeted on Saturday afternoon, “Tweeps, I’m confused. Keep hearing ppl say ‘ABC news is reporting 2 million’ - where is this coming from? have not heard anyone say that.” (Later, she elaborated: “I don’t know where those numbers are coming from, but there’s no way there were 2 million there.” And, a bit later: “for the record, park police and capitol police do NOT give crowd estimates. so far @dcfireems is the only official agency to release #s.” And, a bit later: ““have checked all of our coverage - ABC never reported 2 million. if you find it, send it to me. this is a total myth.”)
Rest of the outing here
There you are Galt, fake pictures, fake statistics, fake facts, false assumptions, and FAUX NEWS.
.
.