Is there an official National Park Service estimate of the Beck-a-thon today?

[Nikki Stone1]

I am reading "thousands" in several sources, but there's no exact count. You can bet if there were 20K people there, we'd be told "tens of thousands". I can't find a National Park Service estimate.

[pinto]

1. They no longer do crowd size estimates.

Some controversy with some past estimates and they dropped the practice.

[Saphire]

2. I thought I heard this morning that they don't estimate crowd size anymore...

[Nikki Stone1]

3. That's a shame. NPS always underestimated, but they were usually in the ballpark

Now, we're left to biased cable news channels.

[Tippy]

4. While checking I found this

Comparison of Washington Crowd Sizes
By comparison, here are crowd sizes in Washington for previous marches as well as this year’s presidential inauguration:

Pro Ku Klux Klan march Aug. 8, 1925 35,000
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” march Aug. 28, 1963 250,000
Anti-Vietnam War march Oct. 15, 1969 200,000
Anti-Vietnam War march Nov. 15, 1969 600,000
Anti-Vietnam War march April 21, 1971 500,000
Pro Gay Rights march Oct. 11, 1987 500,000
Million Man march Oct. 16, 1995 400,000
Inauguration of Pres. Obama Jan. 21, 2009 1,800,000
Glenn Beck’s anti-Obama 9/12 march Sept. 12, 2009 60,000


http://www.pensitoreview.com/2009/09/13/right-wing-lies-about-912-crowd-size-too-extreme-even-for-fox-news/

[pnorman]

9. Those were the numbers I was looking for in another thread1

Thanks!

[Tippy]

12. your most welcome...

[handmade34]

5. for perspective...

"Joel Osteen is pastor of Lakewood Church, the largest evangelical church in America with 30,000 (up to 45,000) weekly attendants. With a TV ministry, it's watched in at least 100 countries" from an article entitled, "Selling God A Lucrative Business" cbsnews.com

also top ten churches
http://www.sermoncentral.com/articleb.asp?article=Top-100-Largest-Churches

Glenn Beck finally realized that there is more money in selling god than anything else

[thewiseguy]

6. Park official told NBC reporter 300k people at Beck's rally

But they longer do official head counts.


Closing thoughts from Carrie Dann: Today's rally was indisputably huge. NBC's Domenico Montanaro noted one park service official's estimate of over 300,000 but please note that the park service no longer provides "official" estimates.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/08/28/4989729-scenes-from-the-national-mall

[Nikki Stone1]

7. Thanks.

.

[RamboLiberal]

8. Are you sure park official wasn't responding to the permit?

Which listed up to 300,000 attendees which was approved I believe about a week ago.

CNN was just reporting and didn't estimate crowd and said Park service no longer did. They showed MLK march and said it was 200,000. Looking at that where people were packed in and video I saw today where it looked like while a lot of people there wsa also more room to move around I'd bet Beck crowd was less than half.

I did read there was quite a backup at Metro stations getting tickets.

[Andy823]

14. That's what I heard

The "permit" was good for 300,000, not that there were that many there. Once Beck said over 100,000 then later I heard him say something about "over" 300,000, but he said it was the "media" numbers, and that was most likely Fox who came up with the numbers! I am sure my Monday's show he will have come up with some huge number, and back it with Fox news reports!

[stewert]

15. Andy....................

Beck said some of the media was saying 1,000, 2,000, tens of thousands, 300,000, and 500,000, then he said if the media says it was 500,000 only God knows how many people were really there.

But he never said what media gave those numbers, ever. No names just numbers. Basically he implied it was more than 500,000, and that the media is lying when they say it was 500,000.

I am guessing 100,000 to 200,000, but that's just a guess, and no official crowd size numbers have been put out by anyone that I can find.

[Ready4Change]

10. BBC photos link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11121542

This was pretty big. Certainly larger than previous conservative events here.

[jefferson_dem]

11. AP says "tens of thousands".

That sounds about right, as I looked at images and video of the event. They were packed in by the reflecting pool toward the WWII memorial then virtually nothing. It was far less than the amount who attended the concert at the Lincoln memorial prior to Obama's Inauguration. That's for sure.

EDIT: I found some pics of that event.





http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/18/lincoln-memorial-inaugura_n_158905.html

versus (from today)

[Nikki Stone1]

13. Maybe 20K or so?

Hmm.

[Hawkeye-X]

16. No more than 30,000

by my eyeballs.

That's a parade crowd, nothing to crow about.

Anything higher is suspect.

[Nikki Stone1]

17. Sounds right.

/