This used to upset me much more than it does today (LifeSiteNews):
More than 300,000 people assembled in Washington, D.C. for the 36th Annual March for Life. But as far as The New York Times is concerned, it never happened.I'm not suggesting that we ignore the blatant bias of news outlets that claim an "unbiased" approach to their reporting. However, consider:
- The agenda of the MSM was exposed long ago and is not surprising.
- The Times and other MSM are shrinking and becoming less relevant. Bankruptcy looms for many, not because we are in a recession, but because their product is not considered valuable.
- We are building alternatives to the MSM and these are growing. Readers have many choices and those who observe news events are empowered to bypass traditional news outlets and report directly to the public.
You can bet that politicians are taking note of the March and the voice of pro-lifers who continue to make known the injustice of abortion.
I actually think we are overstating the attendance at the March For Life on January 22 in Washington, DC. I would love it if we had 300,000 people at the March, which I attended.
Having been to many demonstrations over the years and knowing something about how the Park Police used to count crowds, my best educated guess as to the size of the March would be 75,000 to 100,000.
I don't think we can defend the figure of 200,000 that was offered and to my mind 300,000 (which is a huge number of marchers) is pretty much out of the question.
There is a history of overestimating the size of marches and demonstrations. In April 1992, the abortionists had a big demonstration in downtown DC and they made the preposterous claim that they had a MILLION people there. This was, as with all claims made by the abortionist movement, beyond the bounds of sanity and the US Park Police estimated 250,000, which was about right.
Also, the claim was made that there were about 1,800,000 people at Barack Obama's "Inauguration" (I put "inauguration" in quotation marks because I do not believe he is a natural born citizen and therefore not a legitimate President). This is also, I believe, wildly inflated. Looking at the extent of the crowd and determining the numbers of blocks involved and approximately how many people each can hold, I tentatively conclude that there were between 800,000 and 1,200,000 people at his "swearing in". This is a huge crowd, perhaps the largest in history, but not nearly as big as was suggested. Metro subway ridership figures also do not support the mind-boggling 1.8 million crowd figure.
By the way, it is physically impossible to march 300,000 people along Constitution Avenue in only 2 1/2 hours. This would have required 120,000 an hour to pass by. This cannot be done. The usual rule of thumb is that about 35,000 an hour can pass along Constitution or Pennsylvania Avenues, broad boulevards though they are.
This would lead to a figure of about 87,000 marchers, which is roughly what I believe we had.
Joe,
I found some aerial photos of three big events in DC, the Million Man March, Stand in the Gap, and Obama's inauguration.
Obama's crowd:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/the_inauguration_of_president.html
Million Man March:
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0cHreG99hl5EP/340x.jpg
Stand in the Gap
http://throughtheveil.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/stand-in-the-gap.jpg
It appears that Stand in the Gap was easily the largest. There are a lot of empty spaces in the Obama crowd that are filled in at the Gap event. The Million Man March may have been as large as the Obama crowd. What do you think?
I wonder if Obama went to Louie Farrakhan's March.
I agree that the crowd at the swearing in of Obama was large. Despite how the MSM likes to suggest that it was not about race, one look at the crowd will convince viewers that it was all about race. How else could 95% of African Americans have voted for Obama? Never have we seen so many of them out for any other inauguration. Let us hope they continue to vote if the future does not have a "person of color" in the running. Maybe, also, these new voters, so enthusiastic for hope, will learn over time that we do not boo an outgoing president and his wife when they are introduced to the assembled crowd. It demeans America.