Right Wing Exaggerates 9/12 Crowd

"Glenn Beck’s anti-Obama 9/12 march in Washington is over, but the fakery continues. During the event, an executive for Freedomworks, the DC-based lobbying firm headed by former GOP House leader Dick Armey that was hired to astroturf the event, took to the stage and, citing ABC News as his source, flatly lied about the crowd size, saying it was about 25 times the D.C. Fire Department’s estimates.

Then, in a move that is atypical of a “liberal media” outlet, ABC struck back:

Conservative activists … erroneously attributed reports on the size of the crowds to ABC News.

Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance.

At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.”

Brendan Steinhauser, spokesman for FreedomWorks, said he did not know why Kibbe cited ABC News as a source.

As a result of Kibbe’s erroneous attribution, several bloggers and commenters repeated the misinformation.

It goes without saying — or at least ABC assumes so — that the “bloggers and commenters” repeating Kibbe’s lie were right-wingers. Their ring leader appears to have been Michelle Malkin, who was caught, as GOP Facebook blogger Sarah Palin would say, “makin’ stuff up“:

Malkin plucked out of thin air the bogus claim that ABC News reported the 9/12 protest crowd was 2 million strong. False. Nobody at ABC News ever made that claim, and no sane observer of the D.C. event today would claim with a straight face that somehow 2 million people overtook the nation’s capitol.

It’s pure fantasy."

Jon Ponder, September 13th, 2009

 

LOL!!!

Priceless picture.

 

Opps: It pays when you're the President and you can control the media:

London Daily Mail: Up To 2 Million Marched on 9/12

Despite political pressures from the Obama administration on ABC News Network to back off its initial quote that two million Americans marched on Washington DC Saturday, The London Daily Mail is standing by the number.

 

So are you saying that the Washington DC Fire Department are a bunch of liars when it comes to stating that the crowd size was 60-70,000?

 

It appears so. Perhaps they are on the Obama payroll?


Media Downplayed 912 D.C. Crowd Size
Monday, September 14, 2009 1:09 PM
By: David A. Patten

Leaders of Saturday's 912 Project rally in the Nation's Capital are dismissing estimates that the crowd numbered only "tens of thousands" as "intentional misrepresentations."

Crowd estimates of the event varied widely. ABC News reported that the crowd numbered 60,000 to 70,000. The Associated Press reported it was in the "tens of thousands," a figure echoed Monday morning on MSNBC. Both of these estimates are ridiculously low, according to rally organizers.

The highest attendance estimate came from the London Daily Mail. It reported "as many as" 1 million people attended. The Daily Mail reported that the crowd "shocked the White House." But if so, that was not reflected by the administration's official statements.

In fact, the administration's remarks before the event appeared to echo statements made prior to the July 4 Tea Party protests, suggesting the event wasn't even a blip on President Obama's radar.

"I don't know who the group is," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday, when asked for his reaction to the demonstration.

Bill Line, communications officer for the national capital region for the U.S. national park service, told Newsmax that no official estimate of the crowd's size had been issued.

"For any event national mall or in any of the various related parks adjacent to it, we do not give crowd estimates," Line said.

More than 20 different conservative grassroots organizations – including the 912 Project, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and Grassfire.org – participated in the rally.

Demonstrators chanted "Enough! Enough!" Others waved signs with messages such as "Go Green, Recycle Congress," and "I'm Not Your ATM" and "Just Say No to Chicago-Style Politics."

Everett Wilkinson, a national leader for the Tea Party Patriots group, says the crowd size caught the park police by surprise – so much so they ordered the event to begin several hours earlier than planned to maintain crowd control.

"I showed up a little before 8:30 a.m. at Freedom Plaza, where we were staging for the event," Wilkinson tells Newsmax. "I was there about a half hour early and it was hard to get to the stage at that time. Around 9:20 or so, I was on stage and the park police came up and said, 'If it keeps growing at this rate we're going to have to ask you guys to start early.'

"About 20 minutes or so later they came up, a little before 10, and said, 'You need to start the march NOW!' It was about an hour and half or so before we had expected to begin. We had overwhelmed the area. From what I understand, we had a couple hundred thousand minimum at that time."

From Freedom Plaza the crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue for hours toward the Capitol.

Videos on YouTube show an overflow crowd on the Mall stretching from the Capitol back toward the Washington Monument.

A USAToday report during the Inauguration demonstrated that such an area could easily contain over one million persons, but accurately estimating the size of any crowd can be problematic. That's because the number of attendees depends on crowd density. Estimates of density often require expert analysis of aerial photographs.

Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests the actual attendance may have been far larger than reported by several media outlets.

"Looking out from the stage," Wilkinson says, "people appeared to be lined up all the way to the Washington Monument. I could tell the crowd kept growing until at least two or three o'clock…. It was shoulder-to-shoulder people, and there was nowhere to move…"

Wilkinson wouldn't rule out the possibility that up to 2 million attended the rally. As for media reports that the number was far less, Wilkinson says: "I think it's intentional misrepresentation. The most novice and naked eye could see the video in the shots taken that there were hundreds of thousands, millions of people there.

"When you have the park police and the D.C. police literally telling us to march two hours before hand, from an area that holds a couple hundred thousand people, saying, 'There's no room, you need to march NOW' … we had tens of thousands probably by 9:30. It was millions by 1 o'clock.

"We literally shut down the highways, the red line rail station had to change things around," he adds. "Looking at the videos posted on YouTube, you can tell it was millions. We completed surrounded the Capitol."

The mainstream media also overlooked the many regional rallies held throughout the country on Saturday to show support for the D.C. event.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that over 1,500 people gathered Saturday for a rally on the lawn of the Utah state capitol. Similarly, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that over 1,000 people braved heavy rain to march in that city's downtown area, chanting "You lie!" and "No more czars!"

 

Congratulations.

You just called the honorable men of the Washington DC Fire Department a bunch of liars.

You must be very proud of yourself.

 

How soon before you start calling me a racist?

I believe the "honorable man" running our country is a liar!

 

And it's pretty easy to see, the guy holding the sign took the picture. The dead giveaway was going after Fox.

 

A simple minded post from simple minded lupus, yawn . . .

Lupus, I am sure you are having a difficult time with that weekend protest, too bad.

 

And yet like flies to crap . . . the Bush lovers and "neo-cons" of ET coming running to the rescue.
Every single last one of them.

I think I see Mercor, Lucrum, Tom B, and Gigsup running for their keyboard too. No doubt, they'll be here shortly. Well, maybe not "giggles" . . . I heard he has a midterm already. Poor guy.

So utterly predictable.