NPR's outrageous miscoverage of the DC peace march
BRAND: Was the crowd as large as expected?Nancy Marshall 'reported' for NPR on the march in DC on Saturday, and her crowd estimate appears to be a complete fabrication. I'd like to allow for the possibility that she's honestly mistaken, but -- well, she can't be. No one who was present, left right or center, would put the crowd at only ten thousand -- and certainly no ethical journalist would include such an outrageous figure in their work.
MARSHALL: It was not as large as the organizers of the protest had predicted. They had said there would be 100,000 people here. I'd say there are fewer than 10,000. However, they did accomplish their goal of actually marching around the White House in one continuous stream of people. It is a little bit thin in some areas, but nonetheless, they have marched around the White House.
I'm not convinced that NPR needs to fire Nancy Marshall as this online petition demands, but NPR needs to address this publicly and immediately.
Comments
How does one go about counting the number of people in a large crowd? I've only ever had to deal with counting people at churches or in hotels or the like, and that's easy, since they're in a grid.
Posted by: nedlog | October 28, 2002 6:21 PM
There are various methods. For one, the average person takes up a certain amount of area (three square feet, I think). So if you know the rough size that people are occupying (say, all the roads surrounding the White House) you can generate an estimate. A simple way to debunk Nancy Marshall's inane estimate would be to point out that 45 ANSWER busses alone left from Union Square in New York. Each bus fit between 40 and 55 people. Let's average that to 47 people times 45 busses. That's more than 2,000 people leaving just from Union Square, just in ANSWER's busses. Her estimate would necessitate that roughly 25 percent of the protest came from just that single pickup spot in New York City.
...
Another way to estimate is to sit at one point of the march and watch the whole thing, as I think someone did.
Posted by: zagg | October 30, 2002 2:32 AM
NPR began reporting the 100,000 figure Sunday, and will air a correction revoking Marshall's estimate this weekend.
Posted by: nedlog | October 30, 2002 1:15 PM
That's great. Why the delay? In related news, the New York Times in their story on Sunday reported the protest as "thousands" of people. Today they wrote a much fuller story putting the estimate at between 100,000 and 200,000.
Posted by: zagg | October 30, 2002 1:41 PM
Interesting outline of crowd management concepts including counting techniques:
http://www.jus.state.nc.us/NCJA/crowdmgm.pdf
Posted by: xowie | October 30, 2002 3:39 PM
Editor & Publisher: Did 'New York Times' Blow Coverage of Antiwar March?
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1752047
Posted by: sudama | October 30, 2002 3:46 PM
Did 'New York Times' Coverage of Antiwar March Blow?
Posted by: sudama | October 30, 2002 3:46 PM
Ha. I didn't know Editor and Publisher is just a few floors above me.
Posted by: zagg | October 30, 2002 4:59 PM
The delay, I imagine, is because All Things Considered is in many ways a different show on weekdays and on weekends. The staffs are entirely different, even though the name's the same. They could have aired a correction Sunday, I guess, but I don't know why they didn't.
Posted by: nedlog | October 30, 2002 6:49 PM
At least people know that a march actually happened in D.C. San Francisco -- where it took three and half hours for the crowd to move from the Embarcadero to the Civic Center, and the crowd was easily 50,000, barely scored a blip on anyone's radar.
It was a great day, though.
Personally, I suspect the corporate media is worred about losing their sources at the Pentagon. Wouldn't be the first time the lied for that cause.
Posted by: judlew | October 31, 2002 11:24 PM
There are also simply sections of the corporate media that have a vested interested in U.S. militarism and war. CBS = Westinghouse, NBC = GE. But that still does not explain the NPR report. What makes the NPR report even odder is that they reported 42,000 for San Fran.
Posted by: zagg | November 1, 2002 7:31 AM
I don't think we have to reach for a conspiracy here. It's possible that Marshall simply believed she was able to estimate the crowd size, and she estimated 10,000. If so, she overestimated her abilities, but she may not have intended anything by it. As for the San Fran number, when did they report that? If it was in the same segment as Marshall, then another reporter provided it. The program's host talked to four reporters in four different cities. The San Francisco guy was reporting totally independently of Marshall.
Posted by: nedlog | November 1, 2002 8:47 AM
The thing about Marshall's report, though, was not simply the estimate of the crowd, but also her characterization the politics of the people there. For sure there was a wide swath of people represented. It was the left in its broadest sense. But in her report she made a point to highlight that people were saying, "something needs to be done about Iraq" and even that some protestors suggesting the UN "ratchet up the sanctions." While there might have been some people with those arguments, I think she made a very bad choice in using that to represent where people's consciousness was at. I don't think those would have been majority opinions. For one thing I was amazed at how many signs included slogans about U.S. imperialism. If you're there protesting imperialism, you're not going to support sanctions or the U.S. "doing something."
Posted by: zagg | November 1, 2002 9:17 AM