March For Our Lives Crowd Smaller Than First Reported, Says Fox News — Organizers’ Claim Of 800k May Be High
The size of the crowd at Saturday’s March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C., may not have been as high as the event’s organizers have been claiming, Fox News is reporting.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of demonstrators descended upon the nation’s capital to demand action on gun control in the wake of the Parkland School shooting on February 14, which left 17 people dead. Just how many showed up, however, is turning out to be a matter of dispute.
Organizers at first claimed as many as 850,000, as USA Today reports, which would put attendance well above that of even the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. According to The History Channel, between 200-300,000 protesters attended that event.
In fact, as Variety reported, the originally-estimated crowd would have made the March For Our Lives the highest-attended youth protests in Washington since anti-Vietnam War protests.
Not so fast, says Virginia-based Digital Design & Imaging Service Inc., which uses aerial photos to calculate crowd sizes. According to the firm’s analysis, at the peak of the rally, at around 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, the crowd size was a hair over 200,000, with a margin of error of 15 percent.
You showed up! More than 850,000 marched with us in DC yesterday. Together, we are so powerful. Together, we will #ThrowThemOut pic.twitter.com/agpcYclgtA
— March For Our Lives (@AMarch4OurLives) March 25, 2018
Of course, calculating the size of crowds at political events has become something of a minefield, which is why the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over national monuments in Washington where political protests are generally held, has stopped estimating crowd sizes altogether, according to the Associated Press. That decision came after a 1995 debacle over the estimated crowd size at the Million Man March. Organizer Louis Farrakhan claimed the target of one million was reached, while the Park Service claimed the crowd was closer to 400,000. Farrakhan threatened to sue, and the Service got out of the business of estimating crowds entirely.
The issue would come up again in January 2017 at the inauguration of Donald Trump. Trump’s then-press secretary Sean Spicer claimed that the size of the crowd was well over a million people, according to Fact Check, and was likely the biggest single crowd to ever descend on Washington, D.C. for an inauguration. In fact, photos of the event show that Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration was much better-attended. Kellyanne Conway would later go on to famously say that Spicer was using “alternative facts” to describe the attendance.
Meanwhile, thousands — if not tens of thousands — of March for our Lives protesters descended on sister marches in other cities across the country.
