Glenn Beck Invents His Own Crowd Figures

[Civicsman]

CBS News commissioned a company that specializes in aerial photos of crowds and estimating crowd size from those photos.

They estimated the Glenn Beck "Restoring Honor" crowd at 87,000. AP provided the photos to another specialist who estimated the crowd at 80.000. With an error of +/- 9,000, the estimates overlapped. CBS elected to use the higher number in their reporting.

According to CBS no other scientific estimate of the rally crowd size was made.

This did not stop Glenn Beck from generating his own number. Speaking from his show on Fox News, he said, "The media can diminish the crowd size all they want, but the images speak for themselves", and suggested the crowd size was at least 500,000.

Curiously, the same independent specialist estimated the crowd size at the Obama inauguration, at the same location, coming up with an estimate of 800,000, He said, "Organizers and supporters are forced to insist loudly that the actual crowd met or exceeded their expectations, for fear that the realistic estimate will be painted as a disappointment. The time-honored way to dismiss scientific estimates that don't reflect the pre-event hype is to claim political bias on the part of those doing the estimate. I am amused to see that those who embraced my Obama inauguration estimate as soberly realistic are now attacking the Beck rally estimate, produced using exactly the same methods, as deliberately biased."

(I italicized the comment about claiming political bias to dismiss science, as the same method is used so often in this forum.)

The company doing one of the estimates has received "hundreds of hate mails and angry phone calls over the estimate of the Beck rally".

[KSagal]

There is more to this story than you posted.

According to a story posted by Michael Calderone (Politico/Yahoo) which I will reprint portions here.

Glenn Beck kicked off Monday's radio show by thanking the many attendees at Saturday's "Restoring Honor" rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial — at least 500,000 by his count. Beck said he's "still waiting on the real number" and plans to look closely during his 5 p.m. Fox News show at photos of the large crowd assembled on the National Mall...


CBS commissioned an estimate from AirPhotosLive, a company that provides crowd sizes based on aerial photos. CBS noted that there's a margin of error of plus or minus 9,000. So, by this estimate, there were as few as 78,000 attendees or as many as 96,000...

...The New York Times cited NBC News' estimate of 300,000, and the Drudge Report amplified the tally even more.
On Monday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough repeated 500,000 several times during "Morning Joe." ... Beck said Monday that he didn't think there were a million people there as some have claimed.

It's doubtful there will be a consensus any time soon. Most likely, Beck fans will cite the organizer's numbers in the half-million-or-more range. Critics might go with CBS's estimate. But those who attended the rally, or who watched it on television, may simply go with their own personal, unscientific estimate rather than the numbers furnished by either media reports or organizers.

As Mr. Calderone says, I don't really think anyone can claim to know how many people were there.

You are welcome to your estimate. I really don't know how many people were there, nor do I think the exact number is that important. There were clearly enough people there to show that what was being offered was resonating well.

Isn't the only number that really counts is, 'How many segways were there?'

Have a nice day.

[eJM]

Originally Posted by KSagal

Isn't the only number that really counts is, 'How many segways were there?'

Abso-fricken-tootley!

[Civicsman]

How many segways were there?'

Using the same methodology that he did to estimate the total crowd size, Glenn Beck would estimate that "at least" 82,000 Segways were in attendance.*


This is the guy, after all, that was screaming not to log into the Cash for Clunkers website because the government would take over your computer, take your information, and/or provide your information to *gasp* foreign governments. This little piece of "news" was provided by one of Beck's "constitutional watchdogs". Beck says he "believes this" because the people in charge are "really, really evil people".

On this link, you will see two complete idiots, and one very smart television entertainer who has gotten filthy rich by telling giving his viewers more of what they already "know" to be true.

[Gihgehls]

Hahaha that's pretty wild.