Unbiased protest attendance reporting

DadaKopf

Not making a big statement, just pointing this out .

Irish Times Breaking News:

Last updated: 22-03-03, 17:09

Over 5,000 gather for Dublin anti-war rally

Over 5,000 protesters gathered for an anti-war rally in Dublin this afternoon.

RTE News breaking news:

(17:44) Up to 10,000 people gathered at an anti-war rally on Dame Street in Dublin.

Thousands turn out for nationwide anti-war protests

16:27 Saturday March 22nd 2003

Thousands of people have taken part in anti-war protests in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast today. Almost 15,000 people turned out for the biggest demonstration in Dublin city centre.

seamus

Ah, 'Over' and 'Almost'. The biased reporter's best friends. Sure if it's close to 15,000 then it's quite close to 20,000. Sure feck it, it's almost 25,000, seeing as 15,000 is greater than half of 25,000. I'm actually finding the whole propaganda war very interesting

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Biffa Bacon

What makes you think bias has led to the different estimates?

And the Irish Times is hardly going to understate the attendance are they? They're totally anti-war.

DadaKopf

It's a longstanding tradition of the Irish Times and other such papers to run soley on the estimates of the Garda press office (estaimates are there, daveirl), which always underestimates crowd sizes.

Newspapers have agendas, they have target readerships - both of which like to credit or discredit the protest in question for those reasons. Journalists often have axes to grind, too. It's just as bad for a newspaper to grossly unerestimate a crowd size as it is for Indymedia to overestimate to add credit to the protest.

Mostly, though, it's probably down to laziness. Newspapers et al, especially RTE news (except for recently, when they decided that covering anti-war protests was cool) get their figures from the Garda press office instead of actually sending someone out there to get an accurate estimate.

gandalf

Well I was there yesterday and given that the whole of College Green was full of protestors I would agree with the organisers estimates of around 10,000 people.

I saw one figure in one of those "Irish" English Sunday papers of 1000 people in attendance. I think you take what the media say with a pinch of salt.

Gandalf.

bonkey

Originally posted by gandalf
I saw one figure in one of those "Irish" English Sunday papers of 1000 people in attendance. I think you take what the media say with a pinch of salt.

Could be worse.

CNN reported that "scores" were arrested in San Francisco and elsewhere, while the rest of the world reported official police figures in excess of 1,300.

CNN also reported that "thousands" were protesting in London yesterday.....while the rest of the world reported figures ranged from between 200,000 and 500,000 depending on whether they asked police, organisers, or other observers.

Whilst this reporting is technically accurate, so would classifying 500,000 people as "tens" or "hundreds", because it is indeed a multiple of these.

Its propaganda. Its media spin. Its the age-old problem that no-one who disseminates news is ever objective. Agendas will always be served - when you cant alter the facts, alter the language.

jc