As journalism instructor Steve Doig correctly notes:
“…estimating the size of crowds at mass public events is much more about public relations than a quest for truth. Whether the crowd is gathering for an anti-war protest, a sports team's victory parade, a golf tournament, a pope's outdoor Mass or the swearing-in of the most powerful man on Earth, organizational reputations and personal egos are ballooned or deflated by public perceptions of whether the crowd is surprisingly large or disappointingly small …”
Indeed, as NBC Chicago is reporting, some civic officials are pushing for an accurate official headcount:
“I am an advocate for open and transparent government,” D.C. Council member Kwame R. Brown said in a statement Friday. “If there is a way to provide an accurate count of how many people attended this historic inauguration, the information should be made available to the public.”
Most organizers say that Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration could draw the largest crowd to Washington in modern times. In a hair-raising moment for some inaugural planners, District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said 3 million or more people might show up, more than double the 1.2 million at Lyndon B. Johnson's inauguration in 1965, the largest turnout the Park Service has on record.
But how do you get those numbers? Are they accurate? It's a important part of a journalist's job who is covering such an event is getting an accurate crowd count even if there are “official” or “police” sources giving one a head count.
Personally, I can't remember ever covering an event where there was a crowd that wasn't too big to actually count. So that's what I do. But when you're talking 100,000 plus or an area that is just too large to see from one vantage point, you've got to be creative. Doig, in his piece, reviews some of the creative ways journalists have tried to accurately estimate crowd size.
And then Doig does the math on the crucial question: Could 2 million people actually jam the Washington Mall to watch Obama's inauguration? His answer is no but you'll want to read his piece to find out how many he believes could fit there.
The New York Times has a neat graphic which takes a look at this issue, as well.
And here's a great statistical nugget I did not know before. Doig has calculated that if a human being who is standing up needs about 10 square feet of space (what he calls the “loose crowd” standard), you could get every single human being on Earth into Miami-Dade County at the tip of Florida. Wow.)
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In my experience, journalists have generally followed a strict guideline when estimating the size of crowds at rallies: if it's a rally that I organized, they drastically underestimate it; it it's a rally that an opposing group organized, they drastically overestimate it. That said, I'm sure that the groups that I oppose would make exactly the same criticism but with roles reversed.