Glenn Beck rally sparks debate over crowd size.
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.The rally — which took place on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the memorial — drew a good deal of controversy, with civil rights leaders holding a countermarch. But the event largely kept free of overt political references, as Beck (a longtime scourge of the Obama White House) had pledged it would. It stressed religious themes, together with celebrations of noncontroversial virtues such as charity and national service.
Even though Beck is still tabulating a crowd estimate, it can be expected to be significantly higher than the number CBS News reported over the weekend: 87,000.
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.
Unlike CBS, most news organizations balked at getting that specific (or hiring professionals to make a head count). Some media outlets played it safe with "tens of thousands," a count that's indisputable. Others went with "hundreds of thousands." Perhaps the only thing the media agreed on — including this reporter on hand — is that a very large number of people assembled to hear Beck speak.
The media, in years past, would typically cite the National Parks Service estimate, along with the organizer's estimates (which tend to be higher). But the Parks Service stopped providing crowd estimates in 1997 after organizers of the 1995 Million Man March assailed the agency for allegedly undercounting the turnout for that event.
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