To the Editor:

Why would a journalist accept the No Kings crowd size estimate of the biased organizers, without journalistic curiosity, questions, or verification?

Do the organizers have a greater interest in truth, than they have in the perception of larger crowds? How can their estimates be proven correct?

Might sympathy for, or bias in favor of, the organizers’ cause have outweighed journalistic integrity, in the un-questioning acceptance of the organizers’ estimates?  “Trust, but verify,” as Reagan said of his Soviet socialist adversaries.

Proof, please, editor.

Edgar V. Tolmie

Altamont

Editor’s note: You can look at the video I took of the Oct. 18 No Kings rally in Rensselaerville and count the 115 people and three dogs who marched; I counted even more in the park at the rally before the march from my perch atop the playground equipment and reported “well over 100 showed up.”

It’s easier to be accurate locally where we have reporters on the scene; that is why our opinion pages are largely limited to the local. But when letter writers like yourself dip into national issues, as you did last week alleging the Oct. 18 protests “may have attracted almost 1 percent of United States citizens,” I added an editor’s note saying: About 4 percent of registered voters in the United States attended the Oct. 18 No Kings rallies according to organizers who estimated nearly 7 million people participated. 

The count reported by organizers, which I linked to, was a figure used by national media as well.

There are no official records of rally counts. To fill this void, Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium has been analyzing publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States. Such analyses take time.

In August, the consortium published its analysis of the first No Kings Day and concluded, “No Kings Day on June 14 was one of the largest single days of protest in United States history.” Even those experts concede: “We could not confirm estimated protest figures at 18 percent of events; almost all of these missing figures were in small towns.”