Politics/Uncategorized

That Press Briefing, Amirite?

Posted on by Tom

Well Trump certainly knows how to set a tone, I’ll give him that.

I specifically linked to CNN’s YouTube video because if Twitter is to be believed, they did not cover the briefing live, and I give them high marks for that.

(Mike Grynbaum is a New York Times correspondent covering media, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt on accuracy.)

CNN also deserves credit for this headline:

White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds

I ragged on them a little bit about backing down in Trump’s press conference, but they are coming out swinging now, which is appropriate.

All of the above aside, I wanted to take a little bit of time and play devil’s advocate. I want to examine the validity of what Spicer said. I didn’t see Spicer’s comments live, I only saw the Internet reactions to them, which can basically be summed up with, “Spicer just blatantly lied to us.” Later, when I actually watched the actual press conference (the video above), I didn’t think it was quite as cut-and-dried as the Internet made it seem.

First we should all be aware that the press secretary’s job is literally to lie to us on behalf of the president. It’s been like that for a long time. Even Obama’s press secretary lied to us. I don’t have any specific examples, but I’m confident that somebody could find some. If they didn’t outright lie, they certainly bent or spun the truth periodically. I’m guessing some of those instances might involve drones or Guantanamo Bay.

So don’t kid yourselves that this is the first time a press secretary has ever spun the truth before.

I’ll admit it seemed pretty blatant in this case, though.

Here is Politico’s transcript of Spicer’s remarks. It looks accurate to me.

These claims were made by the administration:

  1. “A reporter falsely tweeted out that the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office”
  2. “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”
  3. “This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.”
  4. “This was 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.”
  5. “Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted.”
  6. “No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out.”
  7. “By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protestors today in the same fashion.”
  8. “We know that from the platform where the President was sworn in, to 4th Street, it holds about 250,000 people. From 4th Street to the media tent is about another 220,000. And from the media tent to the Washington Monument, another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the Oath of Office.”
  9. “We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural.”
  10. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”
  11. “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 in crowd, and intensity that existed.” [I personally think he flubbed reading this line. He simultaneously said the NYT misrepresented things and then said it was a good picture. I’m not sure what he meant.]

I’ll take these in order. I feel like I’m writing for Snopes. :)

  1. This is true. A reporter mistakenly claimed the MLK bust had been removed, when it hadn’t been. It was corrected, but you only get one chance to get it right the first time. I fully admit that reporters make mistakes in their haste to get a scoop, particularly on Twitter. [Update: More on Snopes.]
  2. The “one particular tweet” is not referenced, but one could assume the picture is the comparison the New York Times tweeted below. I do believe it’s true that those photographs were intentionally framed to show that Trump’s inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s inauguration crowd. In this particular case, it looks like very little had to be done in order to frame it that way, but it is definitely a frame. This is a time-honored political tradition. One could argue all day long whether it’s fair or not, but it is a simple fact that one picture looks like a ton of people, while the other picture does not, and those who did vote for Trump hate it, while those who didn’t vote for Trump love it. Photographs are powerful political persuasion tools.
  3. Floor coverings were definitely used. All the white in the right photo below, one could assume, were covered areas. Presumably they did this because the crowd at Obama’s inauguration really trashed the place. [Update: Added link.]
  4. The implication here is that more people would have appeared in the photo, except that there were more barriers in place to prevent people from getting to the inauguration in time. It’s plausible, but again, we don’t know when the photo on the right was taken, so we can’t really make a judgment on it. My personal speculation is that the photo on the right was taken one or two hours prior to the Oath of Office, based on my observations of a live stream (see below). It’s conceivable that the space could fill in during that time, but I doubt it.
  5. I believe it true that people tweeted inaccurate crowd sizes, because there is no record of the crowd size.
  6. To the best of my knowledge, it is true that the National Park Service does not count the attendees at an inauguration or release estimates. Whatever numbers you hear about the size of the crowd is estimated by third parties. Why? I don’t know exactly, but it’s probably because that number is extremely volatile politically, don’t you think?
  7. I haven’t seen any estimates of the number of protesters at the 2017 Inauguration, so I can’t comment. It’s undoubtedly true, though, that a precise mathematical figure does not exist.
  8. I have never heard these numbers before and can’t comment. I am tired of writing this post and can’t be bothered to try to verify them. The claim that “all of this space was full” is very debatable. Let’s assume the NYT photo is fake and can’t be trusted. I did a little digging on my own and watched some of the Inauguration live stream found on the Committee’s web site (see below). In my screen grab, all of that space does not appear to be full.
  9. This post is getting very long, and I can’t verify those DC Metro numbers. I wouldn’t even know where to go to look anyway. Is it true? I don’t know. Is it plausible? Sure. Is it an open-and-shut slam dunk case? No. A huge number of variables could affect whether that number is meaningful or not.
  10. I don’t believe it was the largest audience to witness an Inauguration in person. It’s plausible that it was the largest worldwide audience for an Inauguration, though, when you count people watching television and live streams both in the United States and abroad. I personally witnessed several Twitter users from other countries talking about it as it happened. I don’t care to investigate concrete numbers, and I doubt they would be available yet anyway. So is this truth or spin? Oh it’s definitely spin, because it’s unlikely that concrete mathematical numbers are available or ever will be available. [Update: It’s plausible to me simply because the technology of streaming video is so much more prevalent today than it was in 2009, and more people would have access to it today than in 2009.]
  11. I’m not entirely sure what Spicer was trying to say here. I think he was trying to say that the NYT printed a photo which showed a massive attendance, but flubbed it. The photo that the NYT tweeted below shows a full attendance, but only in the first section nearest the podium, which I agree was full.

Here are the tweets for reference:

 

Now about that photograph.

First I want to say that I completely believe that there were fewer attendants at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s inauguration. Obama was the first African-American U. S. president in history. Trump wasn’t. It makes perfect sense that Obama’s would have more than Trump’s.

But.

I have looked and looked, but I cannot find the source for the photo on the right. The New York Times credits the “58th Presidential Inaugural Committee” in the picture, which I think is supposed to be the Joint Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.

However if you Google those exact words you get www.58pic2017.org. Way down at the bottom of the page it says “paid for by the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committe.” There are no photographs on that web site, only a live stream archive showing the Inaugural Ball, the night of the 20th. It’s possible that the frame below right image in the comparison above was taken from the live stream of the inauguration, which is now gone, but I can’t confirm or deny. [Update: Paragraph edited for clarity.]

Could it have been taken at 9:00 AM instead of 11:00 AM? Absolutely. Does that matter? Absolutely. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance both before and after the actual Oath of Office.

Speaking of sources, where did that one on the left come from? It’s credited to “Getty Images” in the picture. At appears to be this one, which will cost you a cool $595 to use. I can’t help but note that the image description does not say what time the picture was taken, either.

If you go to Inaugural.senate.gov, which is the home of the Joint Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, there is a 6 hour live stream archive of the Inauguration. The camera only shows the view from the podium side, but there is one point where the camera does a pan from the back to the front. I captured this picture:

You can see the white covering in the image there as well. There isn’t a time stamp on the video, but I would estimate it to be roughly an hour before the Oath of Office. This image was broadcast just about the time that Trump’s sons and daughters arrived on the stage.

It looks like there could be more people than that Twitter image suggests, but there is still a fair amount of empty space that wasn’t there in 2009.

Obviously the camera angle matters, too. The lower the camera angle, the more populated the crowds appear.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Snopes also looked into it, and they have more people and patience for fact-checking than I do.

Sheesh writing political posts is exhausting.

UPDATE:

Here’s my conclusion: The 2017 Inauguration crowd size was smaller than the 2009 Inauguration crowd size, but by how much will remain debatable. I don’t think it was as much smaller as the left might want, but I can stipulate it was noticeably smaller.

I would like to see a comparison between the crowd size in 2017 and the crowd size in 2001, which is a comparison that makes more sense to me. Both of those years was a change from a Democratic president to a Republican president. And then I’d like to see a comparison to 1993. I would guess that 2017, 2001, and 1993 were similar, which would make Trump’s inauguration an “average” crowd size, thus meaningless to both sides of the political spectrum.

I predict that in future Inaugurations, steps will be taken to prevent taking pictures of the National Mall from the reverse side (I presume those pictures were taken from the Washington Monument). It’s too much of a political hot button now.

Tom