30 million attend beck rally!

Glenn Beck kicked off Monday's radio show by thanking the many attendees at Saturday's "Restoring Honor" rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial — at least 500,000 by his count. Beck said he's "still waiting on the real number" and plans to look closely during his 5 p.m. Fox News show at photos of the large crowd assembled on the National Mall.
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Even though Beck is still tabulating a crowd estimate, it can be expected to be significantly higher than the number CBS News reported over the weekend: 87,000.

CBS commissioned an estimate from AirPhotosLive, a company that provides crowd sizes based on aerial photos. CBS noted that there's a margin of error of plus or minus 9,000. So, by this estimate, there were as few as 78,000 attendees or as many as 96,000.
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Without official estimates, any numbers published by reputable news organizations — like the 300,000 estimate — quickly got picked up and repeated enough to almost become fact. Domenico Montanaro, an NBC News off-air political reporter, tweeted Saturday that a Parks Service official said there were probably 300,000 to 325,000 in attendance (even though the Parks Service wasn't officially counting). The New York Times cited NBC News' estimate of 300,000, and the Drudge Report amplified the tally even more.

On Monday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough repeated 500,000 several times during "Morning Joe." (That's the number organizers of the event gave to The Upshot on Saturday.) Beck said Monday that he didn't think there were a million people there as some have claimed.

It's doubtful there will be a consensus any time soon. Most likely, Beck fans will cite the organizer's numbers in the half-million-or-more range. Critics might go with CBS's estimate. But those who attended the rally, or who watched it on television, may simply go with their own personal, unscientific estimate rather than the numbers furnished by either media reports or organizers.

Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann told supporters shortly after the rally that "we're not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today — because we were witnesses."

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