Alex Koppelman: The Final Word On Crowd Size At Protest "I Was There And..."

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Mon Sep-14-09 07:42 PM
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Alex Koppelman: The Final Word On Crowd Size At Protest "I Was There And..."

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room

MONDAY, SEPT. 14, 2009 18:15 EDT
The final word on crowd size at conservative protest

It's a little ridiculous that the Internet is still filled with arguments over the size of the crowd that attended the conservative protest at the Capitol on Saturday (and yes, I recognize that War Room has had a few posts on the issue). But I feel the need to weigh in on this one final time, because the right is still hopping mad, convinced the media has been playing down the attendance figures, and they're still dealing with a lot of bad information. Plus, I was there, and I saw the actual scope of the protest for myself. It was not nearly as large as a lot of people are saying.

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I've covered my share of protests and rallies by this point, and I now have a routine for doing so. Before starting to interview protesters, I try to walk around and through the event to get a feel for the mood and size of the crowd. That's what I did on Saturday, too: First, I walked up as close as I could get to the podium, which was on the Capitol lawn, to try and look down at the National Mall and get a sense as to how many people were there. It's hard to blame anyone who's basing their belief that the crowd was mind-bogglingly large on that perspective alone -- from there, due to a large group of tents set up on the Mall, it seemed as if the protest stretched for miles.

But then I went for a walk along the Mall. From the ground there, it was clear the rally petered out pretty quickly. Some on the right are claiming that more than 1 million people were at the event. In order for all those people to have space to stand, the Mall would have had to be packed from the Capitol down past 1st, 2nd and 3rd Streets and as far as 14th Street. In fact, as I noted in a post to Twitter that I wrote from the Mall, the crowd "all but end at 3rd Street." There were some protesters scattered through the block from 3rd to 4th, but not many, and after that it was green space all the way beyond 7th Street, at which point the tents -- which were for an unrelated event -- took over. (If you're not familiar with the geography of the Mall, there's a map here.)

Don't believe someone from Salon would accurately report what he saw on the Mall on Saturday? That's fine -- take a look at this photo, from a post on a conservative blog that's been used as evidence of a big crowd. Just past all the people in the foreground, you can see a bright blue blob -- that's a Freedom Works bus, which was parked on 3rd Street. (For perspective, look to the far right of the photo, where you can see the two buildings in the National Gallery of Art; the first stretches from 3rd to 4th.) Beyond that bus, up until the tents begin, all you can see is green grass.

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