Estimating the size of crowds at public campaign events has become big business in politics. Candidates strive to surround themselves with the biggest possible crowds, while opponents strive to belittle the size of those same crowds. Caught in between, wary news media, trying to avoid being anyone's pawn, have taken a variety of approaches, sticking to their guns at one end of the spectrum to near-appeasement on the other. Two big Wisconsin political events this month brought home the growing inconsistencies.
On July 1, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spoke at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison and filled the 10,000-seat facility, more or less to capacity. That figure was the norm used to enumerate the crowd in most Wisconsin and national news coverage next day. A notable exception was the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which besides relegating its own account to page 3 merely referred to “thousands” of attendees, without ever providing readers a hard estimate.
Skip ahead to yesterday, when Gov. Scott Walker announced his run for the Republican presidential ticket. The Journal Sentinel bannered the news on the top of page one -- arguably reasonable, given Walker’s favorite-son status in Wisconsin, although from a strict news standpoint his plans to run were not exactly breaking. But in its multiple-story package covering the event, the newspaper did use a hard number for attendance at the Waukesha County Expo Center. A turnout of 3,000 was the report from most other news outlets, and the Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert joined that scrum.
The 3,000 number is eyebrow-raising on two counts. For one thing, the Expo Center’s modestly sized, oval auditorium doesn’t appear capable of legally holding that many people. According to an online convention industry calculator I consulted, the oval can comfortably handle around 1,600 persons. Perhaps by jamming people in, you could double that, but wide-angle photos of the event do not show any such jam, which in any event apparently would have violated the occupancy fire code. In 2008, religious leader Ken Ham commented on a religious gathering where he appeared in the very the same oval:
“It was standing room only at the Waukesha Expo Center (near Milwaukee, Wisconsin) on Saturday for the VCY America Radio rally I spoke at. “Sadly, over a couple of hundred people had to be turned away, as the building reached the fire code limit for the numbers in the center. If we would not have had to close the doors, nearly 2,000 people would have attended.” I don’t hold copyright permission and so can't share them here, but if you search images online for the Ham and Walker events and compare photos, the crowds look remarkably alike. So did the Walker crowd really hit 3,000 in that room, or did the room host a much smaller turnout? Say, the equivalent of a Joint Session of Congress?You might think quibbling over multiple newspapers passing along a potential 50 percent boost in the Walker crowd estimate is of middling concern. But in the case of the Journal Sentinel, at least, there is one other factor worth noting.
In recent years, Wisconsin's largest daily has often, as in the case of the Bernie Sanders event, completely avoided reporting hard-count crowd estimates at public events, even to the extent of declining to publish estimates by police or other agencies. Apparently, estimates cannot be trusted because they're not exact. They're only ... estimates. However, as I've shown, the paper's policy nevertheless appears quite situational.
The Journal Sentinel's editorial voice has trended heavily conservative in recent years. That could explain why today's edition offered up a hard-number, possibly overblown crowd estimate for a politician it has in the past consistently endorsed. Or, it could just be a matter of unconscious rooting for the home-boy. Either way, it's not very consistent journalism.
This dichotomy has been a tic affecting the Journal Sentinel’s political coverage for years, now. Follow along below the fold as we explore this more fully.