Open Media Boston

metro news from the ground up

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Where on earth did you get the estimate of 5,000 teabaggers? I read there were more like 1,500. It's bad enough the corporate media is blowing smoke about this waning far-right movement. We expect more from OMB.

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As further clarification, the story does not say "5,000 Tea Partiers" but rather refers to the approximate total number of people in attendance over the course of the rally, which lasted over three hours. 5,000 is a rough, relatively widespread estimate and still lower than the predicted and also reported 10,000.

Ana
OMB

... lacking access to the kind of high-tech laser people counters that some police departments use, all of OMB reporters are trained in basic crowd estimation methods ... at this rally, our reporter made an estimate based on these techniques ... and since Boston Police have long since stopped making pronouncements on rally crowd counts (which is good or bad depending on your perspective), our reporter took her best shot at estimating the size of the crowd at the Tea Party rally ... other estimates are out there - and indeed there would likely have been a slight variance between the estimate of our reporter on the scene and one of our other reporters ... but the main takeaway is that the Tea Party folks put on a decent-sized rally on the Boston Common - be the actual figure 1500 or 5000 or somewhere in-between ... whatever one thinks of their politics, that is the story ... and that is what we reported ... that said, we do generally pride ourselves on giving accurate crowd estimates about all events we cover - since we think that crowd size at events can be an important indicator of public sentiment on key issues of the day - but we are certainly open to issuing corrections on such matters if anyone has hard evidence to prove we made a significant error ...

Jason
OMB

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