It depends. When that brain dead swine Reagan finally kicked the bucket the US media were quick to report "thousands" of mourners whereas foreign media (e.g. BBC) were talking about "hundreds."
But the broader point is that estimating the size of a large crowd is anything but easy. You need a quite sophisticated methodology, say, aerial photographs of the area covered by a crowd and sampling to estimate the actual size of that crowd. The authorities are probably in better position to employ such methods than anyone else - it is simply to expensive and the payoff does not warrant that expense - but then you have idiots like Louis Farakkhan suing the Park Police for providing the "politically incorrect" estimates, so in the end nobody has any incentive to stick his head out but quotes someone else instead. In a word, pomo galore.
Wojtek