Trump Spokesman Sean Spicerâs Lecture on Media Accuracy Is Peppered With Lies | Vanity Fair
En hop de eerste leugens zijn er al, blijkbaar is trump zo onzeker dat de "size does matter" .
Here are 7 falsehoods and mischaracterizations from Sean Spicer’s debut.
“Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.
Spicer did not identify the tweet in question. Here’s an example of a tweet, which compares images of Barack Obama and Trump’s inauguration crowds, which went viral. It’s unclear how this is “intentionally framed.”
“This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings had been used to protect the grass on the mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas in which people were not standing.”
Here are two photos from Obama’s second inaugural address, with floor covering clearly visible.
“This is also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.”
After Spicer’s comments, the United States Secret Service told reporters that no mangetometers were used on the National Mall during the proceedings.
“Inaccurate numbers regarding crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers. Because the National Parks Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count protesters today in the same fashion.”
This was Spicer’s only mention of the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Washington D.C. According to USA Today, early estimates suggest as many as 2.5 million people joined Women’s March events throughout the world. The march was a repudiation of Trump’s attacks on women and minorities.
As for crowd size, media outlets and event experts routinely estimate attendance numbers as events. Sometimes these align with police or official estimates. Sometimes they do not.
“We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 who used it for President Obama’s last inaugural.”
CNN and The Washington Post confirmed Metro ridership with the agency. The full day of Trump’s inauguration prompted 570,557 trips in the system. Obama’s first inauguration drew 1.1 million trips, and Obama’s second inauguration drew 782,000 trips.
“This was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe.”
The aforementioned crowd size estimates, aerial photographs, and Metro ridership reveal Spicer’s claim of “in person” to be false. As for “around the globe” numbers, Spicer didn’t offer specifics.
TV ratings agency Neislen said 30.6 million U.S. viewers turned in for Trump’s inaugural—a figure higher than audiences for President George W. Bush and President George H.W. Bush, but lower than Obama’s 38 million viewers in 2009, and than President Ronald Reagan’s 42 million viewers in 1981. Perhaps Spicer has evidence more foreigners tuned in for Trump, but he hasn’t revealed it.
“Even The New York Times printed a photograph showing a misrepresentation of the crowd in the original tweet, in their paper, which showed the full extent of the support, depth, and crowd and intensity that existed.”
It’s again unclear to what Spicer is referring to. The Times told The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple that they do not know.