By arthur Weinreb
Friday, July 1, 2005Last Sunday, the 25th annual Gay Pride Week in Toronto wound up with its huge parade in the downtown core. The CBC reported that attendance at the parade was "more than 125,000" and sourced that figure as being what the organizers of the event had estimated.
The CBC’s crowd estimate stands is sharp contrast to what much of the other Toronto media reported. CityPulse News, 680 News, and the Toronto Sun all used the one million figure that has been thrown around now for some time by those with a vested interest in inflating the size of the annual event. Someone says one million people are expected attend the parade and much of the media simply blindly reports it, both before and after the event. The media are not immune from the practice that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes a fact.
To put the one million figure into some type of perspective, the population of the city of Toronto (excluding the Greater Toronto area) is 2.4 million. It would almost be as if one out of every two Toronto residents were occupying a relatively small part of the city to watch the parade; pretty well a physical impossibility as well as an unlikely scenario. The CBC’s estimate that they reported as only an estimate appears to be a much more accurate figure. To state that one million people were there or were expected to see the parade is simply bad journalism.
Back in 2003, an anti-war march was held in San Francisco and both the protest organizers and the police had estimated the crowd at 200,000 people. The San Francisco Chronicle had hired a company, air Flight Service, to count the crowd. By using sophisticated aerial photography that was then sectioned off and blown up, the company estimated the crowd attending the anti-war protest at only 65,000, less than one half of the police estimate. air Flight Service said that their figures were accurate with a range of plus or minus 10 per cent. although this system is not 100 per cent accurate, it is much more scientific than estimates by event organizers or police.
The gay-friendly CBC should be congratulated for simply not reporting the one million myth as a fact as so much of the other mainstream media did.