White House spokesman Sean Spicer's first in-office media appearance was to accuse them of lying about how many people attended President Trump's inauguration. Yesterday, Spicer claimed the news media deliberately under-reported crowd size and insisted that the 2017 inauguration had "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe."
One of the photos below is of the crowd just before Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration and the other just before Donald Trump's. Which is which?
It's not even close. The British newspaper The Guardian, which is very decidedly left of center but (being Brit) presumably has no dog in the hunt on crowd size, has an excellent analysis.
Personally, I don't care whether Trump drew one hundred or one million. What really puzzles me is why Trump and Spicer decided to use this matter to go bananas and insist so stoutly, "Trump's is bigger! Trump's is bigger!" What do you think, Dr. Freud?
Update: OTOH, "Trump inauguration ratings second biggest in 36 years," according to Nielsen, but "Nielsen ratings do not account for online viewing, which has grown sharply in recent years and is far more commonplace than even four years ago. CNN, for example, clocked 16.9 million streams on its website, tying with Election Day for the site’s top event."
Posts
