Setting The Record Straight: My Diabolical Tea Party Attendance “Misinformation Campaign”

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Setting The Record Straight: My Diabolical Tea Party Attendance “Misinformation Campaign”

Written By : Tabitha Hale

I hadn’t planned on responding to the entire Tea Party attendance controversy, but since Media Matters is using information I was responsible for to smear Michelle Malkin, I figured I’d set the story straight.

Estimates for the 9/12 march ranged from the “tens of thousands” all the way up to two million. Yes, two million.

While I was attending the rally, I asked a police office how big the crowd was. He said they were estimating it was at 1.2 million people. When I asked a Park service employee, that person told me they thought that around 1.5 million were attending. Perhaps they had some basis for those numbers or perhaps they were just making wild estimates. Either way, after FreedomWorks misquoted ABC’s report on stage, that number was mangled and passed along to me at 2 million. That seemed to be in line with the previous estimates I’d heard at the rally. Had I been at my computer, I would have double checked the estimate and learned that ABC never put out that number. But, since I wasn’t, I tweeted it out on my 22,000 follower Twitter account and it was picked up all over the place.

We still don’t really know how many people were the 9/12 rally. The DC fire department put the number at between 60,000 and 70,000 people. However, other credible estimates put the number at 800,000 plus.

Had Media Matters asked me, I’d have been happy to tell them that I didn’t just make the number up for fun. However, they just ran with an unconfirmed story — just like I did — and, also like I did, they got important parts of it wrong. A mistaken tweeted estimate has now been turned into a “2 million protester lie” and that story is now being thrown around the left side of the blogosphere like mine was thrown around the right.

Bottom line: I tweeted a mistaken estimate instead of writing an entire misleading story about it. I corrected the record instead of trying to claim that a mere mistaken crowd estimate was part of some sort of diabolical “misinformation campaign.” I’ve been wrong before and I will be wrong again. There’s a difference between an error and a lie – figure it out, Media Matters.

CoolCzech

The DC fire department put the number at between 60,000 and 70,000 people.

1. The DC Fire Department has no particular qualification or mandate to make crowd estimates, and it's anyone's guess how they arrived at their number.

2. The DC Fire Department's estimate was issued on the morning of 9/12 – the crowds continued to swell dramatically.

3. The timelapse video of the crowds filling up the National Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue quite obviously put the number up into the hundreds of thousands.

4. I'm quite sure that Charlie Gibson never heard of the 9/12 March on Washington, EITHER.
Mike_M

The number isn't important, since anybody who watches a video can easily tell there were a whole mess of protesters in DC that day.

The story is that the reaction on the left to the Tea Party protests has gone from one of dismissal and ridicule to fear. Alinsky power tactics preach ridicule as their most powerful rhetorical weapon. They're not making fun of these protests anymore.

They're trying to obscure and politicize something as basic as a crowd estimate. The weekend protests weren't chuckled about in the media this time, they were scrubbed entirely, with outlets ordered not to report anything about them. There's a concerted effort to depress the public impression on the attandence of the rallies.

Before they were saying "Look at all these craaaazy Republicans!" Now they're pleading "Don't say anything about it!"

They're terrified and bordering on outright panic. A concerted push to paint all criticism of Obama as racist has begun in response, and it's all they have left. Fear has entered the debate from the left as a corporeal entity.
smelvertising

The number isn't important since anybody who watches a video can easily tell there were a whole mess of protesters in DC that day.

Yes it is, precisely because very few will watch the videos.

What the left can (rarely) do astroturfing, the right can do grassroots. That is at least as big a story as the rest. After all, if that's how much better the "community organizing" of individualists is… how much better would an individualist state be?

That question should be out there.

PS: interesting, but (as always with liberals) not very surprising, that those who claim there was a "misinformation campaign" regarding the numbers are claiming such ridiculously low numbers, with the solo political goal of marginalizing such a huge protest into irrelevancy… in other words, an actual misinformation campaign.
D-Vega

It was definitely in the range of a very large protest, 250K+.

But it wasn't 2 million. That was a number taken out of thin air. 2 million would have nearly shut the city down, as happened with the inauguration.
D-Vega

And left has been doing grassroots organizing for decades.

These protestors should be commended, but its no more special than the hundreds of thousands who consistently protested the Iraq war.
Clint

The general media is downplaying this for the same reason they're practically ignoring (except when forced to acknowledge) the whole ANSWER-brothel debacle. Neither helps their hero, so therefore they aren't really happening. You know, Ministry of Truth and all that.

These protestors should be commended, but its no more special than the hundreds of thousands who consistently protested the Iraq war.

I'm not sure I'd want to use these folks as an example of anything, since we haven't seen hide nor hair of them since Obama was elected. Not that the war suddenly ended, they just…stopped protesting. Was the war suddenly okay because it was Obama's rather than Bush's? They weren't "peace" or "anti-war" protesters, they were "anti-Bush" protesters pure and simple. In other words, heroes of the media trying to ignore the 9/12 protest.
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