Was Attendance at Glenn Beck Rally Inflated?  Why?

Posted Aug 30, 2010 by Walt Belcher

Updated Aug 30, 2010 at 03:06 PM

Reporters sometimes have a hard time judging crowd size. I know because I have tried to do it a few times myself.

But being off by 400,000 seems a bit much.  So how many people really attended Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on Saturday? Organizers estimated the crowd size at 500,000. But a CBS analysis of the crowd puts it at about 80,000 to 90,000.

CBS News commissioned an estimate by AirPhotosLive.com, a company that uses aerial photography to judge crowd sizes. Based on the detailed photos AirPhotosLive put the attendance at 87,000.

AirPhotosLive.com has a margin of error of about 9,000. That would translate to between 78,000 and 96,000 at the rally. The photos used to make the estimate were taken at noon Saturday (when the company estimated was the rally’s high point).

AirPhotoslive uses cameras on tethered balloons to produce high-resolution aerial photos. This apparently is more accurate than eyeballing the crowd and guessing how many are there.

Beck himself had estimated he would draw about 100,000 and that would be close to the CBS figure. Even 100,000 would be an impressive number.

An off-air NBC News political reporter tweeted that a National Parks Service official had estimated the crowd at 300,000 to 325,000.  Citing the NBC source, the New York Times reported 300,000 were “stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.” The figure was used by the Drudge Report. Fox News reported “thousands in attendance” and ran a banner putting the crowd at “over 500,000.”

NBC’s “Nightly News” hedged with “tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.” ABC put the number at “more than 100,000.’

Of course, the CBS report is coming under fire from Beck supporters. Attendance results can be controversial. The organizers of an event often inflate the numbers while their opponents deflate the numbers.

“We are humbled that you are here,” Beck told the crowd. “The reflecting pool holds about 200,000 people. This field back here holds about 250 to 300,000 people. They are not only full here, they’re full in that field, they’re full behind me, and they are now across the street approaching the Washington Monument.”