FreedomWorks discredited on protest crowd size, but CNS touts its numbers anyway
September 14, 2009 12:17 pm ET by Terry Krepel
The malady of inflated attendance numbers for Saturday's anti-Obama protest continues to spread throughout the conservative media world. A Sept. 14 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas states:
Adam Brandon, spokesman for Freedom Works Foundation, one of the main sponsors of the event, estimated the crowd at 150,000. But on Sunday, the group's Web site estimated that hundreds of thousands of people turned out.
In fact, the closest thing to an official estimate comes from the Washington, D.C., fire department, which reported a turnout of 60,000 to 70,000. But Lucas didn't report that -- or the fact that FreedomWorks already has a record of making false assertions about turnout numbers. ABC traced a claim that it had reported that more than 1 million attended the rally -- ABC reported no such thing -- to FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe.
Lucas later uncritically noted that "High Caliber, a conservative rapper," said, "I've done tea parties for 500 people. But not 500,000 or whatever it is we've got here." Because rap artists, unlike those big government fire departments, are accurate estimators of crowds, apparently.
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He didn't purposely mislead anyone.
And I have a bridge for sale.
I'm just so glad the 'liberal media' doesn't have a 'double standard'.
counting tiny bubbles in their minds inside their bubble
It's the disconnect. It has totally gone beyond 'not credible' and out far away to some TVzoo where one goon in a glass cage is talking on the intercom to the small group of gawkers in the same one building. Which is a waste of a coast-to-coast TV channel ... switch their camera to black and take the channel back, recycle the resource to something somebody watches.
They LIE more and dig their LIARS pit deeper. Which stinks too much to lure anyone to fall into it anymore, and attrition leaves fewer and fewer cretins at the bottom. Dam they're dum
I can assure you, the fire department in DC was not counting the crowd that was "outside" of the circle on the west lawn of the Capitol building. Apparently they didn't count the crowd that was on the west side of the Capitol reflecting pool, nor the south north lawns. Did they count those crossing over 3rd Street, flowing onto the main mall between the Capitol and the Washington monument and up to the entertainment tent for the NCNW Family reunion, nor those continuing to come off the metro trains until 3:00pm in the afternoon?
I can also assure you the other bloggers here don't or won't leave their computer chairs for a cause they believe in, either.
But it's not a million.
And a hundred thousand's iffy too.