White House slams media on inaugural crowd size
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, took to the White House briefing room for the first Saturday to lash out at news organizations and accuse them of false reporting about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration the day before.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the world,” he said. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”
He took no questions and did not say how many people the White House believes attended the inauguration. He said three large sections of the National Mall that each held at least 200,000 people were “full when the president took the oath of office.”
He alleged that some photos of the inauguration were “intentionally framed in a way” that minimized the crowd.
Trump earlier on Saturday, in remarks at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., said that from his vantage point at the podium, “it looked like a million, million and a half people.”
Photos showed that the Mall was not full in the sections Spicer described. There was also sparse attendance along the parade route from the Capitol to the White House.
No official agency provides estimates of the size of gatherings on the Mall.
Television coverage of Trump’s inauguration reached an average of 31 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media figures reported by The Associated Press. By comparison, almost 37.8 million views watched Barack Obama’s first swearing-in ceremony in 2009 and 41.8 million viewers watched Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural.
Spicer also blasted Time magazine reporter Zeke Miller, whom Trump also had singled out, for a Twitter post that said a Martin Luther King Jr. bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Miller later corrected his mistake, saying the bust had been hidden from view by a door and a Secret Service agent.
“We’re going to hold the press accountable,” Spicer said. McClatchy News contributed.