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Restoring Honor Rally crowd size
The crowd packed nearly a mile of the National Mall, but the issue of how many attended is "hotly contested." The New York Daily News said the answer to the question of how many attended "depend[s] dramatically on who you ask," and that controversies over crowd estimates of recent large political events had drawn almost as much attention as the events themselves. The National Park Service no longer makes its estimates public because of previous controversies, including the threat of a lawsuit in 1995 by the organizers of the Million Man March over an alleged under count.

Prior to the rally Beck had expected 100,000 to attend. At the rally he joked that "I have just gotten word from the media that there is over a thousand people here today." Later on during the rally, Beck said he heard the crowd was between 300,000 and 500,000 and said, "if that's coming from the media, God only knows how many." The day after the rally he said the crowd size was "on the low end, 300,000, and it may be as high as 650,000. But there were hundreds of thousands."

CBS News commissioned AirPhotosLive to produce what CBS called the only scientific estimates of the crowds size. AirPhotosLive gave an estimate of 87,000 attending, with a margin of error of 9,000.

Brian Williams from NBC News said NBC had estimated a crowd of 300,000. NBC News reporter Domenico Montanaro tweeted that an unnamed official at the top of the Lincoln Memorial said 300,000–325,000 were present. NBC Nightly News said there were "tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands." The Associated Press said the crowd was in the "tens of thousands". Sky News said "around 500,000". The Washington Examiner said "photographic comparisons to past events suggested a crowd well into six figures." The New York Post reported "an overflow crowd of 300,000". The Daily Telegraph said "several hundred thousand" were there. ABC News said the rally "attracted more than 100,000 people." McClatchy Newspapers said "hundreds of thousands".

Some media outlets declined to give any estimate, with the New York Times simply calling the crowd "enormous" and NPR saying "there was no way to get an accurate count on the Tea Party faithful, or the throngs at large. But it was a massive turnout." FOX News referred to a "strong" turnout and "huge crowds."