When I was in college, I had a poster that featured artwork kind of like this, except that the bricks were gray:
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deberarr | Deposit Photos |
I didn't go yesterday. I had every intention of going, but it snowed overnight and most of the day, and I was a little worried about driving in it. But we had about 2,000 people turn out at our state capitol building, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican this morning. Our rally was one of several planned across the state, including Albuquerque, our largest city, where the media reported turnout only as "thousands".
Interestingly, that's the same vague number I saw out of most news organizations during the day for the all of the events combined: "thousands". The NBC-owned TV channel in New York City would only say that organizers expected thousands to come -- despite aerial photos showing the crowd stretching 20 city blocks.
Later in the day, some news organizations bumped the crowd-size numbers up to "hundreds of thousands".
But I was following the Alt National Park Service account on Facebook, which said their final attendance figure for all 1,200-plus rallies across the country was five million people.
That's a pretty big discrepancy.
A friend on Facebook blamed it on the corporate takeover of the American media by billionaires who support Trump (or at least want to keep doing business under the Trump regime).
That sounds plausible until you look at foreign coverage of the protests. For example, The Guardian, which is British owned and proclaims proudly that it doesn't bow to Trump, used the same vague wording as every other news organization: "Organizers estimated that more than 500,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere." The BBC wouldn't commit to a final tally at all, sticking with "thousands".
Here's the thing: It's hard to get an exact number of attendees at big outdoor events. You can get an estimate by counting the number of people in a specific area of known size -- let's call that a "unit" -- and multiplying that times the number of units that the crowd covers. That's the way the National Park Service used to do it in DC -- until the Million Man March in 1995, when the organizers claimed three million people attended and got big mad when the National Park Service said it was more like 400,000. It was far from the first time that event organizers had disputed the NPS's official counts. So Congress inserted language in the next appropriations bill that removed funding for the NPS for crowd size estimating.
Now, 1995 was a while ago, but not so long ago that folks at the NPS have forgotten the methodology, which was never much of secret anyhow. (It's the same way you figure out how many jelly beans are in a jar, right?) The Alt NPS folks said they had a representative at every rally yesterday, and those reps were the ones who came up with the attendance figures for each rally.
But why aren't the media going with the Alt NPS attendance figure? My guess is that they have no way to confirm it, and they figured it was safer to go with something vague like "organizers said thousands had registered to attend" and maybe also say that "organizers later said way more people showed up than they expected" than to go out on a limb with the figure of five million.
Are the media deliberately downplaying yesterday's crowd sizes? Maybe. Is it because of some edict from their owners? I doubt it -- mainly because photos and video of the rallies are readily available. If the oligarchy were indeed trying to promote the undercount, all that photographic evidence would be gone.
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Here's your periodic reminder that media is a plural noun and requires a plural verb.
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Oh hey, I just found out that if you want a copy of the poster I used to have, it's available on eBay. It can be yours for just $40.48 (plus shipping, no doubt). I think I paid a buck and a quarter for mine in 1976, but hey, it's a collectible now, amirite?
The poster attributes the quote to someone named "Bradford", which is clearly wrong. And somehow, that seems appropriate.
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These moments of bloggy plausibility have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!