That Spicer Briefing

Trump’s Press Secretary Falsely Claims: ‘Largest Audience Ever to Witness an Inauguration, Period’
In his first official White House briefing, Sean Spicer blasted journalists for “deliberately false reporting,” and made categorical claims about crowd-size at odds with the available evidence.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/inauguration-crowd-size/514058/

In his first appearance in the White House briefing room since President Trump’s inauguration, Press Secretary Sean Spicer delivered an indignant statement Saturday night condemning the media’s coverage of the inauguration crowd size, and accusing the press of “deliberately false reporting.”

Standing next to a video screen that showed the crowd from President Trump’s vantage point, Spicer insisted that media outlets had “intentionally framed” their photographs to minimize its size. After attacking journalists for sharing unofficial crowd-size estimates—“no one had numbers,” he said—he proceeded to offer a categorical claim of his own. “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” he said, visibly outraged. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

As my colleague Robinson Meyer explained on Friday, modern crowd-counting methods can be laborious efforts. Steve Doig, a professor of journalism at Arizona State University, has provided estimates of crowds at past inaugurals, and is well-versed in the challenges they present. “There’s no turnstiles; you didn’t have to buy tickets … so the standard metrics for measuring a contained crowd are not available,” he said. “The fallback is overhead imagery.” That allows experts to estimate the density of the crowd, and divide it by the area it covers, to produce “a reality-based estimate of the crowd.” Based on the photographs available in the media showing the part of the crowd that was on the mall, he said, “the claim that this is the largest ever is ludicrous on its face.”

The only numbers Spicer cited were ridership numbers from WMATA, the D.C. public-transit system. “We know that 420,000 people used D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural,” he said. But the figures Spicer offered were not consistent with those provided by WMATA officials, who told the Washington Post that 570,557 riders used the Metro system between its 4 a.m. opening and its midnight closure on Friday. That number falls short of both President Obama’s 2009 and 2013 inaugurations, which saw 1.1 million trips and 782,000 trips respectively.

Preliminary Nielsen figures also show that Trump’s inauguration received fewer average TV viewers in the United States than Obama’s first inauguration. The Los Angeles Times reported that 30.6 million viewers tuned in for Friday’s ceremonies, 19 percent below the 37.8 million viewers who watched in 2009. The figures still place Trump’s inauguration ahead of Obama’s second inauguration, as well as the first ceremonies for President Clinton and both President Bushes. Ronald Reagan holds the record for inauguration viewership, after 41.8 million viewers watched his swearing-in ceremony in 1981.

As Spicer later correctly noted, the National Park Service does not offer official crowd estimates. The agency abandoned the practice after receiving criticism for its low estimate of the Million Man March in 1995. But independent estimates, and other publicly available evidence, indicates the crowd was smaller than the one that appeared for President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. Keith Still, a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, told The New York Times that the crowd on the mall itself was about a third the size it had been in 2009. Photos taken from the Washington Monument facing towards the Capitol show a visibly smaller audience compared to similar images taken in 2009, images from the parade route showed largely vacant stands and stretches of empty sidewalk, and Washington mass-transit officials reported far comparatively lower ridership figures for the city’s Metro system.

Spicer did not take questions. He also did not address the far larger crowds in Washington, D.C., on Saturday that took part in the Women’s March on Washington.

Doig, the journalism professor, cautioned, “take all partisan estimates of crowd size with a grain of salt. Crowd size has become a badge of honor or shame depending on who’s wielding it. This has gone on for decades, claiming exceptionally large crowds or claiming really the crowd was tiny.” He defended the role of the media in adjudicating these disputes. “Let the partisans on either side claim whatever they want about the size of the crowd,” he said, “but somebody needs to produce an independent estimate.”

PA Ram wrote:

Post-Truth America.

People will create their own reality.

This may be the most dangerous thing of all about these times.

Truth doesn’t really matter anymore. Team matters.

This was started years ago with Limbaugh and Fox News and Ann Coulter and others. Now it’s in the Oval Office. People will believe the “truth” that suits them.

R.I.P. Truth.

P.S. Yes there have always been lies and propaganda. But it has never been to this bold level about something so insignificant and easily checked. There is no point to the press even showing up for Spicer’s briefings.

Well said, PA.

I also think the current situation is unique, but it’s been building for quite some time. The right has engaged in a pretty obvious strategy for a long time now. Basically, “flood the zone.” Push so much bullshit into the system, Americans of good will are overwhelmed and, basically, give up. Either with fact-checking the bullshit, because it’s endless, or on the possibility of changing things altogether.

That was the goal.

What’s different now is the “gaslighting” of America, coordinated by Trump, Bannon, the Alt-Right and so on. It’s the relentless push for “You didn’t really see what you just saw.” Trump, and now Spicer, add aggression to the gaslighting, as well as covert and overt threats. When it was just the fringe-right on its own, most of us could brush this off, mock it, laugh at it, ignore it. But now it’s literally at the center of power. It’s still the fringe, as far as the absolute absence of truth, but the fringe holds power . . . . and that means the gaslighting will be even more aggressive, more totalizing and their “flood the zone” strategy will intensify.

To me, this is ideological war. The right’s thought of it in those terms since the early 1970s, while the left laughed off the very idea. It’s not funny anymore.

Zooey wrote:

I wonder what would happen if the media responded to Trump’s insistence to decide who covers the White House and who doesn’t by not sending anybody at all. How great would it be if nobody showed up to a press briefing.

I was thinking the same exact thing.

It’s too much to ask, just as I was hoping no Dem would show up for Trump’s inauguration, period.

But would be great.

Don’t cover his faux-pressers. Don’t cover his tweets. He hates the media so much and calls all of them dishonest and the worst people on earth? So be it. He can make his case through right-wing media, alone, thus putting the lie to his criticism of “the media.”

Billy_T wrote:

First, I’d tell politicians and their shills, you work for us. You don’t get to say you invited the Press in. The American people are temporarily renting OUR house to you. It’s not yours. And here, in our studios, you can’t even say you have a temporary lease. We invited you here, and if you won’t answer our questions, you won’t ever, ever be back. We don’t need you. But you need us. We could find tens of thousands of people who’d love to fill your spot, most of whom wouldn’t lie to everyone, gaslight the country, and do this endlessly without shame.

Yes but the press today is all about ratings. Trump and his thugs get ratings. No one cares about some policy wonk who will try to explain why block grants for medicaid are a terrible idea. America doesn’t care. Keep it simple–put it in a meme and say how great America will be. Otherwise–they can watch “Pawn Stars” or some such thing. Ratings “Trump” all. So t some point the press may have to lick their boots.

Trump knows this. They are going to do things HIS way. The press will have to come along in time. There’s always a Fox News ready. NBC not interested? Yawn. Head over to Fox. People will watch.

The press will not set any rules in the long run. Trump is patient. He’ll wait.

He knows we’re in an Idiocracy. He gets it. And he’s the king.