realDrinker: Power Line - Dueling Narratives in DC

As you're undoubtedly aware, major demonstrations are going on today in Washington and around the country. The DC protest is the biggest, with some observers estimating that over a million people--a figure that seems unrealistically high--have gathered to demonstrate against the Obama administration's liberal policies. We'll have more to say about this, but for the moment, here is a CNN news report that I found wonderfully symbolic. CNN had a reporter live at the rally to do an interview about Joe Wilson. Why that made sense I'm not sure, apart from the liberal media's determination to deflect attention toward Wilson and away from Americans' widespread dissatisfaction with the Obama administration. What followed is pretty entertaining:

We are living in a weird era, in which news organizations studiously avert their eyes from the news.

PAUL adds: I'm struggling to write a legal brief and thus not at the event. The MSM is estimating the crowd as "thousands" (MSNBC) or "tens of thousands" (the Post). Fox says tens of thousands too However, a friend who is there tells me it's a "six figure" size crowd.

It's hard to estimate the size of large crowds even in the absence of bias, and nearly every march on Washington that I can recall has produced wide variations in size estimates.

MORE (from Paul): Mark Hemmingway filed this report from the march. He agrees with my friend that the crowd was "well into six figures" and finds reports that estimated the crowd at 350,000 to be plausible.