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Going to the Rally to Restore Fear/Sanity


PromoTheRobot

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I was wondering about that looking at the photos. What's up with that? Why would you hold a rally, expecting 100's of thousands of people and make them all stand off to the side and have this big pool in the middle of the stage? I know lots of people do it, not just Beck. I'm just wondering about the rationale behind it.

From what I understand it was all about connecting with Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech anniversary. I read that Stewart originally wanted to be in the same spot but the Lincoln memorial was not available for such events after October so they switched to the Capitol end.

 

PTR

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No actually I don't know how that worked out, other than Michelle Bachman saying there were a million people at Beck's rally. CBS hired a company to do a photo study. I assume they did a unbiased job, but if you don't agree with the numbers then I guess you think it is biased.FYI I just looked at the photos on that site Dan posted. Both look impressive but it's hard to compare because of the reflecting pool in the middle of the Beck rally.

 

PTR

No, I don't think it's biased, I think it's inaccurate. I remember when the Unions had the 10/2 rally, and CBS estimated that rally as to having nearly 200,000 in attendance. Then look at the photos of the Beck rally & Union rally, and the Beck rally clearly has more. I disagree with Bachman saying there was a million at that rally too. But CBS was way off on their "guesstimate" of 87,000, I'd say there was more like 300,000 maybe 400,000. I'm not saying CBS is biased, I'm saying they should have hired a better company when they did that photo study.

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"The most scientific such stab at judging the Stewart crowd appears to have been carried out by CBS News, which hired Digital Design at AirPhotosLive.com to do the work. They came up with a figure of 215,000. Digital Design uses cameras on tethered balloons to take high-resolution photos of a crowd. Then they enlarge the photos and begin counting. They try to figure out the density of sample crowd areas. Then they extrapolate from there based on how far the crowd spread. You can read about how one of their estimators goes about the work here"

 

Sounds like a fairly reasonable method to me.

 

 

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