A column on writing from Editor & Publisher July 11, 1981.

How many?

(Ed. note, 2009: This column on counting, which ends with examples from conservative religious groups, is the perfect example of how stories must be frequently updated. Falwell named his movement Moral Majority, formally dissolved it in 1989 and revived it 2004 as the Moral Majority Coalition. He died in 2007, age 73. Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition in 1987. Wikipedia reports that "some 15% of the electorate in the United States tell pollsters they align themselves with the Christian right.")

How do you count a crowd? How many, for example, and who said how many, were at the 1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert, that watershed of the short-lived Aquarian Age? The papers at the time reported 300,000, then 500,000. The anniversary stories say upward of a million.

Although I covered Woodstock, I have doubts about all the published big numbers, my own included. The local police were our primary source, but unaccustomed to such hordes, they were no better at guessing than anyone else.

Whenever I see a football game on TV, I try to picture that happy Woodstock horde. With my eyes closed to replay the scene in Max Yasgur's pasture, I don't count--through the remembered torrents of rain or the haze of pot smoke--as many people as the Rose Bowl holds, 106,721.

My memory could be very wrong. To check, I should draw a grid over the aerial shot, count the people in one square, multiply by the number of squares, then add a few thousand more for the people wandering around in he woods. Someday, I will.

Numbers are always important because simple counting often leads to understanding. For example, a group recently blew up a New York men's room in the name of Puerto Rican independence. That's an odd way to fight for liberty. Are they a mass movement? A handful? Do they represent anyone else besides themselves? The breaking stories didn't say.

Apart from a 3-line Around-the-Country item, no terrorist story is complete without an attributed guess about their numbers or a statement confessing no knowledge. In their running coverage, CBS radio added an important point as the day wore on: Voters in the last Puerto Rican election had rejected separatism overwhelmingly. The fact helped make sense of the bizarre story, answering one of the reader's first questions: "So what?"

Attribution is needed in case the number later proves wrong; let the writer not be hanged for the mistake. The American press, you will recall, described the followers of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini so confidently and relentlessly as a tiny fringe group that their overthrow of the mighty Shah in 1979 both shocked and baffled Americans. (The CIA was later generally blamed for the miscount.)

Finding the answer to How Many? often takes a little legwork. Woodstock made me number wary, so that when the Scientologists claimed ten million members, but only several hundred turned up for their big Eastern event, I sought a young woman who had published a serious book about them. She had tracked most of their groups around the country. How many members in all? "Maybe 10,000," said she.

William Martin of Rice University found a similar inflation checking the audience of the electronic church, those Sunday morning religious programs widely reported to attract an audience of 130 million. In a must-read, news-making article June 1981 Atlantic, Martin shows that, while FaithAflame magazine has estimated Jerry Falwell's audience at 15 million, A.C. Nielson, the rating firm that has wired enough of that audience's TV sets to make a better guess, gives him fewer that 1 1/2 million. Perhaps 13 million in all tune to the top 10 "Syndicated Television Ministries."

Moreover, the audience seems to have peaked. Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard viewers have declined 21% since February, 1980. "Roberts has lost more than 40% of the audience he had three years earlier, in February 1977," says Martin.

Numbers can be numbing, but they must be nailed down. Would someone draw a grid over the Woodstock scene and clear the record before the August anniversary stories?

2009 P.S. Everyone promises to do it, including me in the above article, but no one has: Draw a grid over a photo of Woodstock, count the people in one square, then multiply, like the cops estimate any crowd.

Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.