Instapundit calls it German Inflation:
After the 2000 elections, many Germans - including Thomas Gottschalk of the famous television entertainment program "Wetten, dass?" - loved to joke about how Americans couldn't count...
Well, looking at German media reports about the demonstrations for and against the war in Washington, it seems that Americans aren't the only ones who struggle with numbers. Here is a small summary of the turnout numbers offered by German media reports:
ARD Tagesschau, SZ and SPIEGEL ONLINE - "4,000 to 6,000" anti-war demonstrators
ZDF and Die Zeit - "About 10,000" anti-war demonstrators
TAZ - "Tens-of-thousands" of anti-war demonstrators
Die Welt - "50,000 anti-war demonstrators"
Die Presse (Austrian media site) - "Around 100,000 Americans marched against the war..."
Do I hear 200,000? 500,000? 1,000,000 anti-war demonstrators? Going once - going twice - sold!
Surprisingly, many German media outlets actually did mention the presence of counter-demonstrators in favor of the United States of America's efforts in Iraq - and their turnout was consistently placed around 1,000 (if they were mentioned at all.) So why was the turnout of one group so inflated - so often - and the other held so constant? Could this have anything to do with bias or a lack of professionalism among German media elites?
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah....
Endnote: SPIEGEL ONLINE's use of the lowest (and most accurate) estimate of the number of anti-war demonstrators can be attributed to the fact that their reporting on the United States has increasingly devolved into a sterile, regurgitated blend of AP, Reuters, dpa and other news wire service articles. Had SPIEGEL ONLINE correspondent Marc Pitzke written the article, there certainly would have been at least 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators in attendance...perhaps even more. He must have been too busy covering extreme obesity, religiosity, obsession with guns, use of the death penalty or social inequality in some other corner of the United States to take part in report on this weekend's anti-war demonstrations.
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