Crowd guess is a nice mess

The Million Man March ruined it for everyone.

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That 1995 gathering was the last in which the U.S. Park Service estimated the size of crowds converging on Washington, D.C.

The number didn't matter to the Park Service. Their only interest was accuracy.

But that wasn't the case with the event's promoters, who went ballistic when the service concluded that fewer than half a million people attended the Million Man March. Those organizers (Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, among others) insisted 1.5 to 2 million people marched.

After those organizers threatened the Park Service with a lawsuit, they finally had enough. Even though their estimate was confirmed by other neutral parties, the fed-up agency announced that while Congress provided them with the ability to estimate crowds in Washington, it didn't require them to do so.

A couple of years later, Congress passed a law prohibiting the Park Service from estimating crowd sizes altogether. The end.

The moral of this tale:

First: Unbiased estimates of crowd sizes are thankless tasks, especially if they conflict with organizers' claims.

Second: It illustrates why it is increasingly difficult to accept as gospel the crowd estimates for the annual Oliver Hardy Festival.

It has become routine to report that the event draws some 30,000 people to the city of Harlem on the first weekend of October. That number has been recited without challenge for years.

But my skepticism alarm went off last week when some of the people making those estimates pumped them full of helium, claiming as many as 40,000 visitors celebrated at the birthplace of the late comedic actor Oliver Hardy.

Knowing human nature, and based on those controversies over crowd estimates in the National Mall, it's not unlikely the festival's boosters would factor a little wishful thinking into their attendance estimates - especially if no one ever questions it.

After all: One of the measures of any event's success is the number of people it attracts. For Harlem, there's civic pride in holding the area's largest single-day event.

But because there's no neutral estimate, there is no way to verify those claims.

That hasn't prevented us in the media from repeating numbers that city officials provide each year, even though those numbers are based on pure speculation.

For example, Mayor Bobby Culpepper explained the estimate to our reporter: The crowd looked bigger than last year, and "everyone" said last year's attendance was 30,000. Therefore, this year could have hit 40,000.

Let's face it: That isn't exactly a scientific conclusion.

The media should be as accurate as we can be - even when it seems inconsequential. As a result, this will be the last year that we report the crowd size from the Oliver Hardy Festival without seeing some verification.

The closest thing to a scientific look at the crowd was by the Columbia County Convention and Visitors Bureau in 2008, when volunteers asked visitors for their ZIP codes.

They found that just 16.5 percent of those at the festival live outside the local area. Because most people who come to the festival live around here, a number as big as 30,000 would represent an unusually large percentage of the local population. That's more than all the students, faculty and staff of all Columbia County's schools, and we know the traffic and transportation effort that takes.

Now: Don't misconstrue any of this as criticism of the event itself. I hope the festival grows so big that the traffic gridlocks the eastern seaboard. But even if that happens, I wouldn't feel comfortable continuing to report a wild-guess number as fact. Readers should expect higher standards than that.

Like the Park Service, I don't expect that view to be popular, especially with those who each year have offered those huge crowd numbers. All I'm asking is that they provide at least some substance for their claim.

Just pulling a big number out of thin air seems to only work in Washington.

(Barry L. Paschal is publisher of The Columbia County News-Times. E-mail barry.paschal@newstimesonline.com.)

Addendum: The headline for this column, "Crowd guess is a nice mess," is a gift for Oliver Hardy trivia buffs. Oliver is often misquoted as saying to Stan Laurel, "That's another fine mess you've gotten us into"; the actual phrase he used was "nice mess."