Yesterday I happened to flip around the channels on my TV just as the ABC and CBS evening news shows were covering the immigration rallies around the country. I also saw the Fox news coverage about 5 minutes earlier. What struck me as most interesting were the crowd estimates and desciptions. CBS announced that 100,000 people marched in Los Angeles. ABC said the crowds were very large but gave no numbers. Fox said that official police estimates put the crowd at 30,000, much less than the 100,000 that the organizers had predicted. regarding the march in Phoenix, CBS also said that there was a large crowd while Fox said that there were about 800 protesters -- again many fewer than had been predicted by march organizers. (ABC did not cover Phoenix in the part that I saw.)
What do these differing numbers mean? Since for both cities, Fox used police estimates, I think it is safe to say that Fox numbers were the most accurate. Another reson for Fox's accuracy is that Fox reported live while CBS and ABC were on tape. Still, it was interesting to see CBS report the estimates of crowd size based upon the numbers that organizers of the march gave out to the press as the expected number to attend. CBS did not even bother to call these pre-march estiamtes. For CBS, they were just facts. ABC, at least, did not get pulled into reporting bogus facts. Sadly, CBS News has become a hack organization. It used to be the nations premier broadcast netword for news. I guess they just do not care about the truth anymore.
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