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From: 7thSon@SLCS.SLB.COM (Chris Garrigues)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Undercounting
Message-ID: <19900117225404.1.7THSON@GLOWWORM.LispM.SLCS.SLB.COM>
Date: 17 Jan 90 22:54:00 GMT
References: <JYM.90Jan16172226@eris.berkeley.edu>
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Organization: Schlumberger Laboratory for Computer Science
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    From: jym@eris.berkeley.edu
    Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 19:22 CST
    
    > Have you ever been to an underattended event which got covered
    > by the evening news, and then later watch the news and see how
    > they made the 20 people involved look like hundreds?
     
    No.  Never.  Not even remotely.

You obviously don't go to enough right-wing events.  They get covered
differently.  :-) 

I've seen this happen at non-political events that are covered for
"human interest".  There's no human interest if it looks like nobody was
there.  As far as political events that I've attended go, I have to
agree with you.
     
    In fact, with one exception, I have never organized for or been at
     a demonstration that the media *hasn't* underreported by at least
      20%.  (Consequently, I automatically mentally add 20% when I
       read such numbers in the media.)
     
    Does anybody have any idea what can be done about this problem?
     I'm pretty sick of it, personally.  How best to take the media
      to task for undermining our efforts?

I've noticed that event organizers tend to over-estimate by about the
same amount as the media tends to under-estimate.  Sometimes when you're
in the middle of the crowd it's very hard to tell the size of the group.
I recall one anti-central-american-intervention march that I was at
where my friend and I fell about 3 blocks behind to grab a quick bite to
eat and when we then looked down the hill at the march ahead of us
realized that the crowd was about half the size that we'd thought it
was.  Naturally, the event organizers thought it was bigger than we did,
and the media thought it was smaller than we did.

    [ . . . ]

    Not that the coverage was particularly good anyhow.  The story in
     the _Boston_Globe_ started off, "The nerds held a rally yester-
      day . . ."
    
~shrug~  That's how friends of mine who saw it described it as well.
People at Lotus thought it was worth a good chuckle.


Chris