A national debt of thousands

I was struck by the mainstream papers' characterization of the crowd at the Tea Partiers in DC this weekend – a couple of the national papers I looked at and the Vicad said something about 'thousands' of people gathering to protest. I looked at the pix that ran with the story and it looked to me like more than thousands, if you figure 'thousands' as being from 1,000 to 9,999. I think the big papers don't approve of the crowd's politics and so short-counted them to undercut their credibility. I don't agree with some of these people either, but giving them a fair count would be the right thing. Stuff like this is the reason that nobody trusts the big coastal papers to report the truth.
The cousins put a different slant on it. From the Daily Mail of the UK:

As many as one million people flooded into Washington for a massive rally organised by conservatives claiming that President Obama is driving America towards socialism.

Read more here. I very much doubt that there were anything like a million people there but feel pretty sure there were tens of thousands at least. I noticed this evening that Gwen Ifill on the News Hour said 'tens of thousands' were present.
I'm glad to see ordinary people angry enough to go tell the gummint, even if I'm not in sympathy with some of the motivations. On the other hand, anyone who was there to complain about the wicked bailouts of Wall Street has my complete approval. Apparently protesters were working from a Chinese menu of grievances.