Comments on: The “false-flag” lie

By: Barry

Barry — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:37:01 +0000

Mark Kleiman: “One problem with telling a lie – especially a stupid, easy-refuted* lie such as “There were more than 1 million teabaggers in Washington on 9/12″ – is that people might not believe you.”

Fortunately, those who do are often media people; if the G-D press would do it’s supposed job, things would go so much better.

By: J

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:29:30 +0000

“Newspaper-shaped object”. Viewed from this (Eastern) side of the pond, that’s one of the loveliest and most apposite descriptions of the Daily Mail I’ve seen. There’s a delicious irony in the thought of anyone – other than with malice aforethought – citing the Mail as a reliable source. I know it’s Glenn Reynolds, but this – “Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?” – is just hilarious, as seen by anyone in the UK who isn’t a Mail drone.

(For those unfamiliar with the organ in question, its primary reputation in its home market among non-readers is as a staggeringly well-resourced, highly-polished, ruthless propaganda engine for its editor’s and owners’ bugbears, which tend towards the kind of attitude which we only don’t call Victorian because that would insult the Victorians. This, after all, is the paper whose snappers were – until relatively recently – rumoured to be under strict instructions to ensure women appearing in their photos were wearing skirts, not trousers…)

By: KathyF

KathyF — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:30:45 +0000

Thanks for pointing out what a joke the Daily Mail is. A few weeks ago several liberal bloggers linked to a DM article that supported their cause, and I was shaking my head, afraid of a future issue in which we’d be forced to rebut that joke of a paper. I guess this is it.

By: K

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:08:40 +0000

Forgive the serial posting, but the ABC News item you link to says: “Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance.” This paraphrase of Kibbe is itself inexact. What Kibbe said was more specific: “ABC News is reporting that one point five million people are here.” This was how he began his remarks. Not “1 million to 1.5 million,” but exactly 1.5 million. I checked the video on YouTube (“Tea Party (Taxpayer) March On Washington DC pt.8,” at 4:49), & it’s as I remembered it.

By: K

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:26:44 +0000

I’ve got no special crowd-counting skills, but, comparing the crowd yesterday to the ones at past events of more or less agreed size, I can attest that the estimates of 2.2 million or 1.5 million are wildly wrong. (To get an idea of the orders of magnitude, the DCFD estimate is about 3 percent of 2.2 million.) If someone told me that 50,00 people were there, I wouldn’t say she was definitely wrong; likewise if she said 100,000. But even the latter is less than 5 percent of 2.2 million.

I accept a certain amount of normal haplessness & irrational exuberance among bloggers, but Matt Kibbe is an experienced operative, knows the city, has lived here long enough to have seen scores of rallies, presumably had access to relevant logistical information (number of buses, registrants, etc.), & had an unobstructed view of the crowd. When I heard him announce that “ABC News is reporting that 1.5 million people are here” (this was somewhere around 2:00 PM), my immediate thought was that this man can’t be relied on to tell the truth. Now knowing that ABC News reported no such thing, I’m not inclined to soften my first judgment.

It was plain at the rally that the FreedomWorks people were preparing to contest press estimates of the crowd size. They repeatedly (including after Kibbe’s announcement) exhorted the crowd to use its cell phones to call a number specially set up for head-counting purposes. (Everybody in my vicinity did as they were told.) I don’t know whether FreedomWorks has released the results, but in any case they know what they are. (I leave the possible problems with this measurement method for others.)

By: The Million Moron March « Red Tory v.3.0

The Million Moron March « Red Tory v.3.0 — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:54:14 +0000

[...] Kleiman has an especially funny take on the attendance controversy (and also draws a similar conclusion — “they’re no more [...]

By: Mark Kleiman

Mark Kleiman — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:29:27 +0000

Here’s an eyewitness account, that puts the crowd at about 1/3 the size of the ANSWER rally in 2005m, which was estimated at 150,000.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/09/one_view_from_the_ground.php?ref=fpblg

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:23:51 +0000

I don’t think there’s any evidence for the 1-2 million claim, and since those are extraordinary numbers, I think there would have to be strong evidence for me to believe them.

But there’s really no evidence for the 60,000 number that you spin heroically as “consensus reality.” The Washington DC fire department hasn’t typically been cited as a crowd size estimator for past protests, and there’s no reason to think they’ve added a new capability. The reporting technique at work here seems to be the typical one of finding a supposed expert to say what the reporter wanted the story to say: nothing to see here.