Blogger I Own The World makes the comparison:
And how did the media portray MLK’s gathering then? At about 250,000.
“The open field on the opposite side of the grove of trees, where tens of thousands of people alone are gathered, was not available space in 1963.” — I Own the World
And Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor gathering now?
I was at the original Second Amendment Rally on that same ground in August of 1994. (This was the rally against Bill Clinton’s “crime bill”. Gordon Liddy was the keynote speaker. I actually stood next to him on the dais.) The crowd size was a small fraction of the Glenn Beck rally, and was estimated at 10,000 people.
As a child, I remember that the news reports of the MLK rally were a half-million people. And, I’d say that was an accurate estimate. The crowd for the Glenn Beck rally appears to be substantially bigger (because people are thronged in the area that was covered by buildings in 1963, plus all of the other areas covered by the MLK rally).
The media does the same thing to other conservative causes. Two years ago, the group Rolling Thunder put A MILLION MOTORCYCLES on the parking lot of the Pentagon, but it barely got a mention on the TV news. When the organizers of the “Million Man March” got barely half that number, it was touted on the news as a smashing success.
Interestingly, the crowd of the Glenn Beck rally is AT LEAST the size of the HALF-million that showed up at the “Million Man March”.
I was at 9-11 last year, I had a view from the press pit saturday. I belive this was much larger a crowd. People spent hours trying to get there once they got to Wqashington, and never actually got on the field. I saw thousands on the field at 11 – 12 O’clock at the night before, it was huge!
What part of arial photos, grids, and counting don’t you people get? Those arial photos even found all the people hidden behind and under trees. Hoping and wishing for a certain head count doesn’t make it so.