Tuesday, January 21, 2003
HOW MANY ANTI-WAR PROTESTORS ARE THERE?
The Nation reports the following:
The Washington Post reports the following:
It may just be me, but it would help the credibility of protest organizers and their supporters if every once in a while they admit something along the lines of the following: "This time we didn't get as many protestors as we had hoped for." This would help me accept their always-higher-than-the-media-or-official-reports estimates of crowd size.
UPDATE: Pictures of the DC protests can be found here as well as the following:
MORE PHOTOS HERE
LAST OF ALL, THIS PICTURE PRETTY MUCH SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
The Nation reports the following:
Despite temperatures which hovered in the mid-20s throughout the day, an energetic protest drew appromixately 200,000 people to Washington, DC's National Mall for an event which DC Police Chief Charles Ramsey said was, "one of the biggest ones we've had, certainly in recent times."See here for more
The Washington Post reports the following:
Tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators converged on Washington yesterday, making a thunderous presence in the bitter cold and assembling in the shadow of the Capitol dome to oppose a U.S. military strike against Iraq.And, later
Organizers of the demonstration, the activist coalition International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), said the protest was larger than one they sponsored in Washington in October. District police officials suggested then that about 100,000 attended, and although some organizers agreed, they have since put the number closer to 200,000. This time, they said, the turnout was 500,000. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey would not provide an estimate but said it was bigger than October's. "It's one of the biggest ones we've had, certainly in recent times," he said.and finally
Regardless of the exact number, the crowd yesterday on the Mall was the largest antiwar demonstration here since the Vietnam era.
It may just be me, but it would help the credibility of protest organizers and their supporters if every once in a while they admit something along the lines of the following: "This time we didn't get as many protestors as we had hoped for." This would help me accept their always-higher-than-the-media-or-official-reports estimates of crowd size.
UPDATE: Pictures of the DC protests can be found here as well as the following:
There were certainly tens of thousands of people there and just as certainly not hundreds of thousands. I cover marches in DC pretty frequently, and I'd say Saturday's march was perhaps 50,000 to 70,000 people. That is, it was a little larger -- though not that much larger -- than the October 2002 protests in DC.
MORE PHOTOS HERE
LAST OF ALL, THIS PICTURE PRETTY MUCH SPEAKS FOR ITSELF
