Glenn Beck Rally Attracts Estimated 87,000

[RamboLiberal]

Source: CBS News

An estimated 87,000 people attended a rally organized by talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.

The company AirPhotosLive.com based the attendance on aerial pictures it took over the rally, which stretched from in front of the Lincoln Memorial along the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument. Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at the rally.

Beck, who predicted that at least 100,000 people would show up, opened his comments with a joke: "I have just gotten word from the media that there is over 1,000 people here today."

AirPhotosLive.com gave its estimate a margin of error of 9,000, meaning between 78,000 and 96,000 people attended the rally. The photos used to make the estimate were taken at noon Saturday, which is when the company estimated was the rally's high point.


Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20014993-503544.html?tag=stack

---

The area around the Lincoln Memorial in Washington during a rally organized by conservative commentator Glenn Beck is seen in this aerial picture taken Aug. 28, 2010.
(Credit: AirPhotosLIVE.com)


The area around the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington during a rally organized by conservative commentator Glenn Beck is seen in this aerial picture taken Aug. 28, 2010.
(Credit: AirPhotosLIVE.com)

I believe AirPhotosLIVE and CBS.

[blueknight]

1. my idiot brother in law

and his idiot wife were two of them. drove from ky to attend

[caraher]

16. My sister-in-law went too

She listens to Rush, hangs with teabaggers... the interesting thing is, she had no idea what the event was until a few days ago, and she was pissed off because she'd been led to believe this was a grassroots gathering rather than a Beck/Palin egofest.

The kicker is, even though she doesn't like Beck she felt she had to go, because her friends were going. My wife and I said she should just skip it, but she was committed.

The organizers of such events seem a bit tone deaf - people know when they're being herded. (They may go along anyway, but that's a different story.) About a year ago there was an angry letter to our (rural, conservative) paper from a guy who was really mad about a Tea Party function he drove to - it was full of Republican politicians! He wanted pitchforks and populism and got people in suits looking to score donations.

[KurtNYC]

40. it's Astroturf

and the GOP is playing with fire by attracting angry people with lies of populism.

[SKKY]

31. I had family drive from Louisville and Elizabethtown to attend...

...you're not alone.

[Roland99]

52. Glad to say none of my family/friends back in Ky went

my brother-in-law in RI probably wanted to go, though.

[sofa king]

2. And none of them were there to see...

The Washington Monument
The Jefferson Memorial
The Lincoln Memorial
The Vietnam War Memorial
The Korean War Memorial
The Roosevelt Memorial
The International Holocaust Museum
The Museum of American History
The Memorial Bridge
or
The paddle boats on the Tidal Basin

all of which are within 1000 yards of Beck's event on one of the busiest tourist weekends of the year.

[atreides1]

3. As for the The International Holocaust Museum

It's actually the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a group of these pinheads did come to visit yesterday.

I know this because I work there.

[sofa king]

7. Oops, my bad.

I don't wish to compound the error, but I have to ask...

How did they find the place when so many of them deny it exists?

[atreides1]

48. My guess

It's next door to the Bureau of Engraving.:D

[cheneyschernobyl]

57. Are there any jobs available there?

Sorry for straying off-subject. I retired from the Air Force 2 years ago; currently have 70% disability. Originally from Arlington. The last time I was in DC happened to be the same day that nut-case shot and killed a member of the security team a little over a year ago.

[alfredo]

4. Beck is claiming 300,000 to 500,000; Michele Bachmann

is claiming 1,000,000. According to WaPo

[Anakin Skywalker]

5. Teabaggers Don't Work Saturdays? Or.....

do these dumb f*cks not have jobs and blame Obama instead of the RepubliCONS who cherish outsourcing and treating workers like slaves?

[jaysunb]

6. I've been in bigger football game crowds

at the Rose Bowl & the Coliseum here in L.A. :rofl:

But they'll spin it their way and the media will go along. Still, that's a lot of stupid people in one place. :evilfrown:

[icnorth]

37. A lot of stupid people in one place

who departed even more stupid than upon arrival.

[unkachuck]

8. at least "...87,000 people..."

....guaranteed not to be voting Dem in November....and the still the Party won't make nice to it's progressive base....

....do they have a November death wish?

[Grassy Knoll]

9. Boo Hoo , What a tragedy........

I think we should send beck a sympathy or get well soon card.
:rofl:

[CLANG]

10. That averages 1740 people per state. Mutiply that by 100 and you have the national wingnut vote.

Who ever thought a couple million morons could make so much trouble?

[tomm2thumbs]

11. I dunno, I see lots of green on those crowd pics - that's grass, not people

They should call it the Million Moran March

[Confusious]

15. That would allow them to say there were a million people there.

The eighty-seven thousand moron march.

[onehandle]

18. They have learned from other failed hate rallies to keep a few feet between them.

Illusion.

[saigon68]

33. Like this one

Shades of this disgrace

[pezDispenser]

27. hahaha n/t

[cheneyschernobyl]

58. You owe me a new keyboard!

:toast: :bounce: :fistbump: :yourock: :applause: :rofl: :spray: :patriot:

[LiberalFighter]

12. Many of them were sitting down in lawn chairs.

Sitting takes up more space than standing.

[davidhilton]

13. Thats one big Klan meeting!

[totodeinhere]

14. NBC News estimated the crowd at 300,000

http://preview.tinyurl.com/399aruu

[dogfacedboy]

17. How many were real teamonkeys, and how many were curiosity seekers?

If I'd been in DC today, I would have attended this thing--strictly out of morbid curiosity.

Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.

[iamthebandfanman]

19. well, lets just hope they stayed in DC and spent money

at the very least ;)

[Vehl]

20. News Flash: IQ of the Lincoln Memorial Area Dropped by 80 points for the duration of this event. nt

[JaneQPublic]

21. The 2000 LGBT Millenium March on DC drew 300,000...

...according to the Park Service. And Gays comprise only 10 percent of the population.

If the Teabaggers can't muster a crowd larger than a group that's only 10 percent, then they should be very disappointed.

[Quixote1818]

22. Well, this is a flat out failure. Will be completely forgotten in a week

and never talked about again.

[SLCLiberal]

23. It's depressing

How many stupid people there are in this country.

[niyad]

24. welcome to DU--like your homepage, there.

sadly, the stupidity factor seems to be growing exponentially.

[Lugnut]

28. Too damned many.

Welcome to DU, SLCLiberal! :hi:

[LynneSin]

26. I hate do disappoint you but Faux News will make sure that doesn't happen

And because Faux News makes a stink about it then CNN & MSNBC will have to play catchup with them

:grr:

[Lagomorph]

47. They've beeen saying that since the first townhalls.

CBS low balled the number, by a bunch.

They keep coming back, making more and more noise.

That they could even draw a bigger crowd than Sharpton, to DC on MLK's speech anniversary day is something to note.

Most of the rank and file come from outside the political 20% of the population, so their demands are unfamiliar to the political establishment. Despite Republican astro-turfing claims, they've gone after both the Right and Left.

Another thing I've noted, is at their age, they aren't easily distracted.

I'm thinking they'll get their footnote in history.

[alp227]

25. HA ha! Reality still has a liberal bias!

no matter how much Glenn Beck and the right-wing echo chamber will insist "hundreds of thousands! hundreds of thousands!"

Earlier I posted a summary of the rally reported by British newspaper The Guardian.

[2Design]

29. that is way too many idiots who vote - how many seniors on medicare? crap

This is horrifying that there are this many ignorant people willing to show their faces in public - I am so tired of the ads here against the LIBERALS and the LIBERAL agenda - they have no idea who or what put this country in debt up to its ears

[demi moore]

30. bigger tax cuts and more military spending

that would have saved the economy.

so yeah.. obamas fault :banghead:

[sakabatou]

32. That's pathetic in numbers

And yet, what's even more pathetic is that they'll garner all the attention of the media. Get hundreds of thousands of Dems and not a peep from the media.

[tomm2thumbs]

34. exactly - given free non-stop FoxNews PR, this is all they can muster from a 'motivated' right?

sounds like they are re-motivating the same people over and over

re-treads

[Turborama]

35. Here's a bigger picture, notice how much grass you can see...

Posted in this OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9034279">You Know Those Small Photos That Make It Look Like Moranpalooza 2010 Had A HUGE Attendance....?

BTW Faux are insisting it was 500,000. SERIES!

[Hawkeye-X]

42. No more than 30,000

that's just about as conservative I would go.

And half of them were there to see the monuments, and absolute no interest in the Beck/Hitler Rally.

[wordpix]

54. now the park service will be shoveling the manure for the next month

[dmosh42]

36. Did he sell those overpriced gold coins to the morons? n/t

[uncle ray]

38. that's a pretty good turnout...of lawn chairs.

it was clear in the ground level photos that everybody was encouraged to bring chairs. a chair takes up four times the space a standing person does, plus the space of the person standing while not using the chair. a good trick being they simply calculate how many are there based on the photos. so by my complicated calculations, the turnout of actual people was somewhere around 25-40k max.

[hollowdweller]

39. How many attended the largest anti Iraq War rally?

I'm sort of trying to get perspective. That many for some talking head that is wacky is a little scarey actually.

[caraher]

41. At least ten times that

and negligible media coverage

In DC? Probably several hundred thousand. Worldwide, probably the record was 2 million in London in February (see Wikipedia)

[jmowreader]

43. jmowreader's estimate: 50,000

It appears to me the teabaggers spread out REALLY far so they could cover as much ground as possible with as few people as possible. Michele Bachmann held a parallel rally at which she claims there were a million people there. (I know, I know.)

I could be low, but if there are 100,000 people there I'll donate a star to five needy DUers. (If the real estimate is between 20,000 and 100,000, which I think it is, I will give one to the first three of you who ask. Series!)

[Thor_MN]

44. Bachmann can't count past 10 without taking off her shoes...

She makes Caribou Barbie look relatively smart

[unkachuck]

45. give me, give me, give me one...n/t

[jmowreader]

46. You should have a starry night

[unkachuck]

50. thank you very kindly, jmowreader....

....a big hug and a kiss from me to you....getting a STAR allows me to dump those nasty ads (sorry, Skinner)....

....and when you're on dial-up like I am, dumping those nasty ads really speeds-up the page loading in....loads in two minutes instead of five... :)

....thanks again, unkachuck

[RamboLiberal]

49. One of the Estimators CBS Hired on how he did calculation

Naturally, I expected more of the same about my Beck rally estimate. To calculate it, I used Airphotoslive.com’s very striking images (MUCH larger than the thumbnail posted here) to make density estimates across different zones of the crowd; a variety of ground-level images from news photographers and attendees who posted their photos on Flickr; and Google Earth to measure the square footage of the different zones. Yes, I included the crowd areas under the trees; the full-size Airphotolive images were detailed enough to discern the edges of the crowd even there.

My estimate is that about 80,000 people were at the rally. Ryan Shuler, an Airphotoslive image analyst, used the same images and a different grid-density method to produce an estimate of 87,000. Considering the error margins around our separately-calculated estimates, they are statistically identical. CBS went with the 87,000 figure, which I certainly can accept.

Now the fun begins in the blogosphere. NBC News, the New York Times, and other large media outlets that didn’t attempt a scientific estimate uncritically accepted Beck’s claim of “300,000 to 500,000″. (At least Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s laughable claim of 1 million isn’t being treated seriously.)

-----

I expect that kind of behavior from partisans on both sides. I am disappointed, though, by the many responsible news organizations that failed to produce their own independent estimates and instead reported only ungrounded hype. Their readers and viewers deserve better journalism than that.

http://stevedoig.com/archives/250

[No Elephants]

51. How many people on the Mall on any random summer weekend?

Not to mention how much free radio and tv advertising this thing has had DAILY, all day long, for months.

Saw a few excerpts. When did Beck morph from RW political joke punch line into Aimee Semple McPherson? I heard Benny Hinn is jealous!

[wordpix]

53. a LOT, and lots of people do last vacations in DC before school starts

[blitzburgh55]

55. If no signs were allowed

how can the first picture on this site be from Whitestock?

http://mainfo.blogspot.com/2010/08/great-american-patriots-crowd-photos.html

[Crowman1979]

56. I hope all of these Glenn Beck rallies are causing a big cash-drain to Newcorp.

And that Rupert Murdoch is just sitting in his couch fiddling around like Nero while his board goes nuts on how much money they are losing.