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Yes, there's more: The right-wing clowning over the bogus claim of 2 million protesters just never ends

September 15, 2009 9:15 am ET by Eric Boehlert

Honestly, I think folks on the right should just stop talking about crowd estimates for Saturday. That hole is already deep enough.

Still, the latest laugh installment comes from Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media, the same right-wing Pajamas Media that did its best to spread comical misinformation over the weekend about how 2 million people had attended the 9/12 tea party. Local D.C. official had a slightly different take on the crowd: between 60-70,000.

So yeah, there's a 1,930,000 gap.

Martin's determined to get to the bottom of the mystery and yes, Martin completely ignores the humiliating role  Michelle Malkin played in pushing the 2 million nonsense over the weekend. No need to embarrass Malkin, Martin just wants to uncover the facts of the attendance mystery.

Here's the part that made me laugh:

Now, via [blogger Stephen] Green, we have a number reported by Barbara Espinosa from the “people meter” on Pennsylvania Ave — a total of 1.5 million people passed by during the march. Now, that’s some kind of direct count, but we don’t know what kind — if anyone has any information on this “people meter” I’d love to see it — so let’s save that as an estimate and see what else we get.

According to Green, somebody counted every person who walked down Pennsylvania Ave. on Saturday and voilà! It was 1.5 million. What Martin failed to mention in his post was that Stephen Green seemed to have a very hard time on Saturday keeping any sort of facts straight about the crowd count.

As I recently noted:  

And then there was the sad, confused work of blogger Stephen Green. Doing his best to spread the word about the supposedly massive crowd size on Saturday, Green first claimed that CNN had reported the crowd was 2 million strong. (CNN never did any such thing.) Then later under a banner that read "correction," Green, following Malkin's phony lead, reported it was ABC News that reported 2 million protesters were on hand. (Green then failed to correct his "correction.")

UPDATED: Oh yeah, over the weekend, right-wing bloggers tried to bolster their case for a crowd of 2 million by posting a bogus aerial photo of the ant-Obama rally.

So there's that.

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    • Author by worrierking (September 15, 2009 9:43 am ET)
         
      Dear Colonel,

      I believe we may have an infringement on your copy write for the Jingometer.

      The crackers seem to have turned the Jingometer into a Peopleometer.

      I've forwarded this to our legal department.
      Report Abuse
    • Author by thegreenmiles5043 (September 15, 2009 10:07 am ET)
      1  
      My math sucks. But even if 10 people passed by on PA Ave every second in a constant stream, it would take nearly 42 hours for 1.5 million people to pass by.
      Report Abuse

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  • County Fair is a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web as well as original commentary, breaking news and rapid response updates to major media events from Media Matters senior fellows and other staff.