In The Hat

The numbers don't lie, the media does

It's true, the numbers don't lie. But that's only true if you actually have all of the numbers. My previous post about the 2,000 mom march reminded me of something - protests, gatherings, kibbutzings, whatever, here in DC usually aren't that well attended. Often times, the media doesn't tell you that.

What the media reports is the number of people "estimated" to show up, before the fact. Take the recent WTO 'protests' for instance - the week leading up to them, national news outlets were reporting that 20,000 protesters were "expected" to show up. DC shut down many streets in preparation for the march, and they had riot police all over the place. Guess how many people showed up? According to the Post, it was around 2,000. By my own estimate, though, I'd put the number at less than 1,000. (No, I wasn't down there demonstrating with these goofballs, but I did happen to jog past a couple of their so-called "events.") The problem is that the national media rarely reports turnout numbers after the fact. I dont know if it's an intentional omission on their part or if it's simply that "poor turnout" isn't newsworthy enough to make the cycle, but either way, the result is that the nation is left with a distorted impression of the actual turnout.

Sometimes, I think that the media does purposely mislead as to the size of a particular demonstration. I'm reminded of an anti-Iraq-war demonstration that happened sometime in the past year - before the fact, the media was reporting that tens of thousands of people would be in attendance. But only about 400 people showed up for that one. Did the media report the low turnout? No. And it wasn't because it simply wasn't newsworthy - national media outlets ran stories after the event, saying things like "the crowd marched to the White House to demand so-and-so," but they never mentioned a number. You can be sure that if the turnout was large that they'd sure as heck give you an estimate of the number of people. The worst part is that some papers carried pictures of the 400 protestors, and they were all carefully framed such that it looked like a large protest.

Because of my own first-hand observations, I'm very skeptical of any media coverage of demonstrations, especially those overseas. Every once in a while you'll see a story such as "Italians turn out en masse to show their hatred for President Bush." When you do, take a closer look - is there an aerial shot of the demonstration? Or is the photographer carefully choosing his shots so as to misrepresent the event in order to push a particular political agenda?