Not Counting Cars

Sadly, my former employer, The New York Times, failed to do the basic and easy reporting to determine how many attended the Waco rally. That’s surprising since one of the Times reports makes it clear that reporters were on the scene hours before Trump spoke, giving them abundant time to count how many cars and pickups arrived and then to estimate the average number of people per vehicle.

Without attribution, The Times described as fact a Waco “crowd of thousands.”

A Times photo caption repeated this: “Thousands of supporters attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday in Waco, Texas.”

The truth: not even 2,000 people attended.

Two thousand people would be the tenuous and minimal threshold for writing that “thousands” turned out in Waco.

One appropriately skeptical reporter was covering the Waco rally: John Mone of Scripps News.

Mone wrote that “hundreds” turned out while noting that Waco police expected about 10,000. Mone’s piece is a model of how to do it. Politics editors and producers would be wise to distribute his piece to their staffs.

How We Estimated Crowd Size

I didn’t go to Waco, so how can I write about the size of the crowd?

With help from two others with investigative reporting experience, we gathered and scrutinized Waco rally still and moving images. We obtained images from various perspectives to make sure we counted outliers.

We then enlarged these images, divided them with gridlines, and painstakingly checked off each human we could see.

To ensure that we gave the highest possible number, we counted as a human being many image fragments that could be just an article of clothing. Understating is a virtue that I teach investigative reporters around the world. But, of course, it’s always best for any subsequent official inquiries to show that situations were even worse than you reported.

The Count

Applying these standards, we could not even count 1,500 people at the rally. That’s not thousands.

Fans packed the three sets of risers behind Trump. Each had fewer than 240 people. In front of Trump, the images showed many empty chairs. There were also images of people leaving partway through Trump’s wandering recitation of grievances and falsehoods, a common occurrence at Trump rallies that is also seldom reported.

DCReport and other news organizations long ago established that many people at Trump rallies are super fans who show up repeatedly. Finding these people in images and interviewing them at rallies is easy. The Trump rallies are thus analogous to the claim that “Atlantic City is America’s No. 1 tourist destination with 32 million visitors” in the late 1980s when I covered that city for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Actually, Atlantic City had about two million gamblers who visited the casinos on average every three weeks.

We invite skeptical readers to check our Waco rally count and contact us via the DCReport Tip Line. But please provide evidence of meticulous counting, copies of the images used, details of counting techniques, and how and when to contact you.

An Old Trick

Trump has been inflating his claims about crowds since long before he came down the Trump Tower escalator with Melania on June 16, 2015, declaring that thousands of people were present.

Anyone who has been in the lobby of Trump Tower knows that that would be a physical impossibility. But, of course, relatively few Americans have ever visited the squeezed pink marble interior on Fifth Avenue.

The failure of politics reporters to point out this foundational lie in 2015 helped propel Trump to the White House.

The politics reporters in attendance that day didn’t even report that something seemed odd about a loud portion of the crowd that broke into applause, on cue, 43 times as Trump spouted his racist rhetoric. That journalistic failing was stunning since Manhattan isn’t known for being hospitable to racists.

One day later, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that those cheering and clapping fans were paid performers. They were television and movie production extras; each paid $50 cash after they helped Trump fabricate an image of overwhelming popularity in Manhattan.

Image Control

Ever since 2015 Trump and his security forces have ousted from his rallies people who pointed cameras at the often-empty seats in the back and sides of venues.

Journalists, confined to a pen, were required to agree to only point cameras where Team Trump instructed, a fact known to relatively few Americans because news organizations rarely, if ever, disclosed this constraint on reporting. And when it was, the facts tended to be buried deep in print and online stories. (Research has established that 85% or so of readers drop off when a Page 1 story jumps to an inside page.)

This journalistic failure is notable because there were easy ways to get around it. For example, my son Andrew, a happy-go-lucky truck driver and disc golfer who lives in New Mexico, attended a Trump rally near Albuquerque.