Insult to my Intelligence by “El País” spanish newspaper
Category: News
I have just read this article from the “El País” about the demostration against the cut of the Statute of Catalonia in Barcelona, a cut that made the Spanish Constitutional Court. This newspaper affirmed that 56.000 people assisted to the demostration, while the police and organizers of the vent assure that it was over a million participants.
Even other media talk about this same amount of participants, may it be because the trust the data given by the police or even using their own methods of calculation.
The Washinton Post
France 24
Aljazeera
The newspaper called El País and Agencia F (media & information agency) use the services of a company called Lynce
The truth is that the calculation explained in the article seemed quite reasonable, as well as the idea of using new and more techniques for computing the number of participants in demonstrations and demostrations, being more able to be precise.
Anyway, if you take a look to the amount of participants (the number) and applying the common sense, it’s clear that 56.000 participants is a number which is too small!! That’s why I decided to apply by myself far advanced techniques like Google Earth and a calculator.
As I don’t have any real Catalan around to be able to measure how much space he/she takes standing on his/her feet, I decided to measure myself letting around 5cm by each side of myself to give some air around me. I don’t think that an Italian’s size and a Catalan’s size aren’t that different from each other, as I’m not that tall nor that short. This give us a result of 60cm back wide and 40cm chest wide. This gives an area of 0.24m²
This would be a Catalan seen from above :)
People aren’t robots and move around, but noting that the demo was literally collapsed and people couldn’t move, the number of participants that at the end were in the streets was more or less constant. Thus, calculating the area that the streets occupy in Google Earth and doing a simple arithmetical calculation we get:
Calculating the area
Even a child can make this simple calculation of the area
The area taken by these streets is 74400m² thus, dividing the area which we calculated before of “how much space would a Catalan take” we get: 74400 / 0.24 = 310000 people.
In this we haven’t taking in mind all the people which were in parallel streets, nor all the people who where squeezed in the squares, and we also didn’t count all those who tried to go but couldn’t because of the collapse.
After some hours, the Spanish newspaper El País “rectified” the number of people attending this event, now with 425.000 participants… It is curious how they have increased the number around 7 times the initial given one.
Okay, you’ve rectified, but anyway I didn’t like what has happened. First of all, you put a number that’s closer to your preferred political view to take to the event strength. But you don’t have the intelligence enough to realize that people aren’t that stupid to stick with such a low number as 56.000 participants. So, no other choice but to rectify afterwards. Anyway, I do feel that the number is lower than the real one, closer to one million participants, but maybe not surpassing that number.
Editors, read carefully, people is not stupid and technology is not a means controlled by just a few. Luckily, means are used by people around the world every day, and as you can see, people can blog and tweet. Social networks as well as Internet are there to eliminate this barrier of darkness which use lots of media as they wish to try to manipulate the mentality of their readers.
I’m not in favor of any political party. I’m not Catalan, I’m Italian. But I don’t consider myself that stupid so that I have to believe such nonsense!
