Photo of "tea party" protests shows crowd sprawling from Capitol to Washington Monument
Bloggers on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 in conservative blogs
Condensed story from 2009 Pulitzer prize winner, Politifact.com Click here for Full Story.
So supporters of September 12th “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.
But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally.
Estimates about the crowd spread quickly through the conservative blogosphere. Many writers, including author Michelle Malkin, pegged the number of people between 1 million and 2 million. Those reports were largely based on information from people in the crowd.
There’s another problem with the photograph: It doesn’t include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth Street and Independence Avenue that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn’t show the “tea party” crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.
Also worth noting are the cranes in front of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the IMAX theater was being built.
It appears that the photo was actually taken in 1997 at a rally for Promise Keepers, a group for Christian men. According to the group’s Web site, nearly 1 million people attended the event. Photos of the Oct. 4, 1997, event that were posted on
various Web sites in 2003, 2008 and earlier this year show either the same picture or a similar photo that has identical tents and what appear to be TV screens in the same locations.
Conservative bloggers who originally posted the picture have backed down.
So Bloggers --- Are you Kidding?
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