Inaugural crowd “guesstimates”

What’s a million or so people between friends?  Quite a bit, actually.

The estimates of the number of people who witnessed President Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday range from a high of 1.8 million to a low of 800,000.

Arizona State University Journalism professor Stephen Doig is responsible for the lower figure.

“My job as a journalist is to call them as I see them,” Doig tells us. “That’s the call I made.”

Doig is making national news today due to his crowd estimate, which he made using a Geo-Eye 1 satellite image. While at the Miami Herald before coming to teach at ASU in 1996, Doig was part of a team that won the Pulitzer and also estimated crowd sizes for Pope John Paul II’s visit to the United States in 1987.

(Satellite image courtesy of GeoEye.  And it’s not necessarily one of the photos used by the professor.)

Newsbusters gathers some of the media estimates of the crowd:

Baltimore Sun: “Inaugural crowd is estimated at close to 2 million”

Boston Globe: ” The National Park Service says it will rely on a media report that says 1.8 million people attended President Obama’s inauguration.”

MSNBC: “Oh, and some guy named Barack Obama. Along with millions of regular folk, celebrities swarmed to DC to celebrate the Inauguration.” (from the same page: “Could Inauguration Crowd Reach 4 Million?”)

LA Times: “Crowds surged in previously unseen numbers today for the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, making it seem increasingly likely that the gathering would reach the record-setting mark of 2 million.”

Here’s where it gets good.

Washington Post: “the official estimate released by the District yesterday is 1.8 million, a figure that would make the gathering the largest ever on the Mall.”

Backstory on that “official estimate released by the District” that the Washington Post is writing about.

AP: “Park service spokesman David Barna said the agency did not conduct its own count. Instead, it will use a Washington Post account that said 1.8 million people gathered on the U.S. Capitol grounds, National Mall and parade route, he said.”

Seems to me these estimates are what we used to call SWAGs: Scientific Wild-Ass Guesses.