Rally To Restore Sanity Schedule

In the post-mortem will surely rally on Saturday to restore sanity and / or fear, there is certainly going to be discussion about how many people turned out - on behalf of truthiness, of course.
Counting heads in the National Mall is a tough job. As difficult and controversial, the National Park Service refuses to do it anymore.
The final count of attendees at the meeting of Glenn Beck in August ranged between 80,000 and 500,000, depending on who was doing thinking - or directly lying.
Jon Stewart does not expect to get anywhere near those numbers. The permit application submitted to the Comedy Central stage of this event is anticipating a crowd of 60,000. A good part of that group - about 10,000 - should arrive via shuttle from The Huffington Post, a fleet of 200 buses that Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington is paying, putting about 10,000 people at the rally.
(See gallery of historic photos of the masses at the mall here.)
U.S. Park Police in the past 14 years has provided crowd estimates at one time - the inauguration of Barack Obama last year. (National Park Service officials said they wanted to know if they broke the previous record set by the 1965 inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson.) In 1996, Congress forced the Park Police to stop estimating crowd sizes after the organizers of the Million Man March threatened to sue the agency to say that 400,000 people had attended the 1995 event, a much lower demand from the organizers own millions more.
''You just have to be so controversial. We have a lot of people who call us names and say to lie about how many people were there. We decided that serves no benefit to us. . . not in our own interés''para recount, then police spokesman Major Robert H. Park Hines said the Richmond Times Dispatch at the time.
Last year, controversy erupted over the size of a tea party meeting in the mall. Rally fans threw numbers up to 2 million to an unofficial estimate of the local authorities ran about 70,000. To support his estimate, the tea party bloggers using published an aerial photo of a crowded National Mall. The only problem was that the photograph had been taken years earlier - before the construction of 2004, the National Museum of the American Indian, not pictured.
Since opening, the Park Police have turned to withdraw from the business crowd to have as the voicemail message outgoing Park Service spokesman Schlosser, David made it clear before the event Beck. "We do not provide crowd estimates you may hear all can not be attributed to the Park Police or the National Park Service."
Crowd estimation is an inexact science that goes back to the decade of 1960, according to Steve Doig, a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It originated with journalism professor Herbert Jacobs. From his office at the University of California at Berkeley, Jacobs had a clear view of the plaza below, where protesters gather liked during the Vietnam War. Using the square as a class laboratory, came loose methodology boils down to how many people can squeeze into a square foot. Packaging situations, a person can hold 2.5 feet square of space. In less congested, a person can occupy 10 square feet of space. In terms of aerial photographs, measuring the square meters by the people, and how the crowd is dense, it can give a rough estimate. Depending on the density, a crowded National Mall may contain between 1.5 million and 3 million people.
How important do you get an accurate estimate crowd? Is the number associated with a demonstration event give further credibility to the message can be? What methods that journalists should use for reporting crowd estimates? Is it inevitable that organizers claim will be dramatically larger than the estimated neutral sources? Come forward with your thoughts on the comment board below, and if you dare, including his prediction / estimation of the crowd at the Colbert-Stewart performance.
(Editor's Note:. It's much easier to count the crowd in a march in a speech or demonstration because a team of reporters can be positioned in a single funnel point along a march and literally hand-count Counting a crowd vast mass of people, and below the Lincoln Memorial, is more difficult and there are usually two main ways to do this: 1) Use of aerial photographs and divide the area into the networks. 2) people at key points of the station and walk through the crowd doing a hand count. Neither is foolproof, but both can give good estimates .-- Marc Fisher)
Some parts of this message appeared on an Aug. 30 post on the crowd in the manifestation of Beck.