The estimated crowd size for Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall in Washington varies depending on who you ask. The company AirPhotosLive.com estimates, with a margin of error of plus or minus 10%, that 215,000 people were in attendance. And according to a Times reporter, the Park Service privately told Viacom there were "well over 200,000" sane ralliers. But another estimate pegs the crowd at 6 billion, according to a post on Stephen Colbert's Twitter.
The most important thing is that the rally drew more people than Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, unless of course you go with Glen Beck's numbers. AirPhotosLive.com estimated Beck's crowd to be between 78,000 and 96,000. But Beck claims his rally attracted at least 500,000 people, telling his Fox viewers, "The media can diminish the crowd side all they want, but the images speak for themselves." Obviously, images taken from the sky by AirPhotosLive.com don't count.
Speaking of the media, the Times's David Carr is getting hate mail for his report on the rally, which criticized the rally's cable TV news-bashing. "Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television," Carr opined. "In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans." Apparently his critique didn't go over too well with those whom Carr describes as Stewart/Colbert "cult members" and today Carr tweeted, "Dear rally people in inbox Sorry am so (stupid, lazy, ignorant, arrogant, moronic) and glad that your march agst name-calling worked out."
Below, The Gregory Brothers have already autotuned Jon Stewart's final speech. And for more photos from the rally, check out DCist, which says, "We could prattle on about the long lines, Metro delays and most people's inability to see or hear anything when they got to the Mall. But there are plenty of people who get paid a lot more money than us to make such sweeping statements about such things (not to mention, there are plenty of people who would do it for free)—so we'll just show you all the visuals from Saturday's rally and let you make your own conclusions."
