White House Press
Secretary Sean Spicer used his first appearance in the White House briefing
room to unequivocally rebuke the press and accuse reporters of misreporting the
size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Spicer claimed that
photos of the inaugural crowd on the National Mall did not accurately reflect
the number of people who attended the event on Friday. However, photos of Trump’s inauguration showed
that the crowd was significantly smaller than it was at Barack Obama’s
inauguration in 2009.
Spicer also criticized
a report from White House reporters saying Trump had removed a bust of Martin
Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. The report was later corrected.
Spicer accused members
of the media of engaging in “deliberately false reporting” on Trump’s
inauguration. The comments from the White House’s chief spokesman signal that
he will not hesitate to dispute facts and does not intend to back down from
taking a combative stance against the press, which the administration has already threatened
to relocate from its current space in the White House.
“Photographs of that
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 said.
He claimed that the
crowd on the Mall stretched from the Capitol to the Washington Monument,
although photos clearly show that it did not. Spicer said fences and
magnetometers had prevented attendees from getting to the Mall quickly. He also
claimed that white protectors for the grass had been used for the “first
time in our nation’s history” and highlighted where people were not standing.
However, workers rushed
to install grass protections ahead of former President
Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration, NBC Washington reported at the time.
Spicer’s comments came
after Trump, without prompting, spent a lengthy amount of time during a visit
to the CIA earlier in the day complaining about press coverage of his
inauguration. Even though the president has an unmatched ability to drive news
coverage, Spicer accused the press of focusing on trivial details.
Spicer called the
inauguration reporting “shameful and wrong,” and Trump said earlier in the day
that the media would “pay a big price” for it.
“This was the largest
audience to ever witness and inauguration, period, both in person and around
the globe,” Spicer said. However, his television ratings alone were lower than
those for the inaugurations of Obama in 2009 and Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Spicer also claimed that 420,000 people took the
Metro for Trump’s inauguration, and that fewer people had used the public
transportation system to attend Obama’s inauguration in 2013. The Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority reported
that 193,000 trips had been taken as of 11 a.m. Friday ― reportedly fewer trips
than were taken either day Obama was inaugurated.
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