I, not “we,” made an error in the Sunday edition of Osborne Ink. By failing to sufficiently fact-check a timeline, I included Michelle Malkin’s screencapture in a post on FreedomWorks’ vastly inflated attendance estimates.

Having ensured the fairness of Osborne Ink, here is the balance:

FreedomWorks, the main organizers of the Tea Party event in Washington this past weekend, has dramatically lowered its estimate for the size of the crowd at the event from 1.5 million, a number the group now concedes was a mistake, to between 600,000 and 800,000 people — though this is still substantially more than the tens of thousands that most mainstream media outlets have estimated, and which FreedomWorks wholeheartedly rejects. The politically charged issue of crowd size is complicated by the fact that there is no official estimate — not from the Park Service, not from the D.C. Police, nor the Fire Department, etc. In fact, a Fire Department spokesman that I talked to told me that whoever had given a figure of 60,000-70,000 to ABC News had not been authorized to do so. So there’s no independent source to verify FreedomWorks’ latest number.

Further balance from TPM

The rest of the article is substantively true, including the role of “coffee260.”

I am always happy to correct the record; but I will not apologize to Mrs. Malkin until she apologizes for “nutroots.” She has no room to talk about the sanity of others.