George:

This may be a minor, but I think perhaps, still significant quibble regarding Bob Gibson’s write-up in Tuesday’s Daily Progress. The story indicates that there were about 50 people in attendance at the candidate reception at Trinity Episcopal Church, while we had two people from the sponsoring groups unofficially doing head counts and they came up with counts of 65 and 67 people respectively.

I realize that it’s hard to be exact at these sorts of functions with people coming and going, but my point is that if these two people were correct, that’s roughly a 30% underestimate on Mr. Gibson’s part. I don’t mean to single him out per se. At a rally last year sponsored by some of the same groups, a Progress reporter claimed that there were 150 people present when I and another individual counted over 250 people.

I know one argument is that organizers are prone to inflate their numbers, but I’m confident this was not the case in these two instances. I realize it’s not a reporter’s primary function--to “guesstimate” the size of crowds--but when significant underestimating becomes commonplace, it gives the impression that journalistic accuracy is not as important as it could be and it promotes an erroneous depiction of the support these events/organizations actually have. This results in an unfair representation for the readers/viewers/listeners, the participants and the organizers. It also falsely signals candidates, those already in office, policy makers in general and the media, that certain groups and issues can be easily marginalized.

Again, my intention is not to criticize Mr. Gibson. I don’t mean to assign him any malice, just a certain lack of attentiveness to detail. I think his article overall portrayed the event and the candidates’ remarks fairly and I appreciate his being there to cover it. My wish is to encourage him and other journalists to be more mindful about this aspect of reporting and to take the few extra minutes necessary to conduct an accurate head count in the future.

Millie Fife (electronic mail, May 26, 2005)