That’s Not the 200,000 I Knew
Barack Obama may serve on the Senate Banking Committee after all. His crowd numbers earn interest!
Just how many showed up for the Ich bin ein beginner speech?
John Rosenthal compares the Obamedia’s estimates to German public tv’s much lower numbers.
“Obama Addresses 200,000 in Berlin” — thus ran the AP headline the day after Barack Obama’s much-hyped speech in front of Berlin’s Siegessäule or “Victory Column.” This 200,000 figure has quickly become the standard estimate of the crowd for Obama’s speech in both the American and the German media: so standard indeed that it is for the most part not even treated as an estimate.
The estimates given by German public television ZDF actually during the event, however, were as many as 10 times lower. …
Barely five minutes before the speech was supposed to start, ZDF Berlin studio chief Peter Frey added, “We do estimate that 20,000 [literally, “a couple of ten thousand”] people have turned out.”
It’s not like the Germans don’t turn out for popular events:
As the Berlin-based writer Christian J. Heinrich notes: “During the big anti-Bush demonstration after the fall of Baghdad, there were 250,000 people. And it looked totally different from yesterday. Then, you couldn’t move all the way from the Brandenburg Gate to the Technical University [on the western side of Tiergarten park, another kilometer beyond the Siegessäule].”
Which would ruin the media’s story. Europeans hate Bush and America as a sport, like European Cup football. They may not hate Obama (yet), but they aren’t going to turn out for a love-in for him. Where’s the fun in that?
Just keep tellin’ them lies.
martino said,
July 25, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal thinks the whole discrepancy has something to do with the metric system:
Adherents to the metric cult like to rave about how easy it is to multiply by 10. It’s a familiar enough refrain: “We were only following orders [of magnitude].” A blog post by John Rosenthal of World Politics Review casts further light on this theme. Most news reports put the attendance at Obama’s big Berlin rally last night at 200,000. According to Rosenthal, however, “the estimates given by German public television ZDF actually during the event, however, were as many as 10 times lower”–which is to say, one-tenth as high…”
What accounts for the discrepancy? Maybe when Obama himself showed up, the reporters mistook him for a zero.
Thoughtful said,
July 25, 2008 @ 5:30 pm
Too bad Bill couldn’t have run for another eight years; at least most of the international community liked us then. I might be sounding like a true Republican when I make this statement, but screw the rest of the world; we have issues of our own at home that we’re not attending to. We should work on our economy, unemployment rates, energy and global warming issues, and debts to pay back. There isn’t going to be a “victory” in Iraq because that place is so damn scewed up to begin with, nor would there ever be a “victory” in the first place. A victory in Iraq was would be like a victory in the Vietnam War; non-existant. That region is going to tear itself apart anyway, so let them fight themselves instead of us. It may just turn out like Japan in WWII; the little buggers wouldn’t stop coming at us so we had to drop a few bombs to shut ‘em up.