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| A photo issued by Reuters during the inauguration ceremony on Friday |
The White House on Saturday accused the media of framing photographs to understate the crowd that attended Donald Trump’s inauguration, a new jab in a long-running fight between the new president and the news organisations who cover him.
In an unusual and fiery statement on Saturday night, White House spokesman Sean Spicer lashed out about tweeted photographs that showed large, empty spaces on the National Mall during the ceremony on Friday.
“This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said in a brief statement. “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm about the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”
Washington’s city government estimated 1.8 million people attended President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, making it the largest gathering ever on the Mall.
Aerial photographs showed that the crowds for Trump’s inauguration were smaller than in 2009 but there was no indication from the circulated photo showing the Trump crowd was taken before or during the inauguration ceremony.
Spicer, who did not take questions from reporters, said spaces for 720,000 people were full when Trump took his oath whereas media reports put the number at 250,000.
He also said the National Park Service does not put out official crowd counts. “No one had numbers.”
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| The photo being circulated on the web shows Obama crowds on the right |
Washington’s Metro subway system said 193,000 users had entered the system by 11 a.m. on Friday, compared with 513,000 at that time during Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Spicer said the Metro numbers up to the inauguration were 420,000.
Spicer also criticised a reporter who misreported during a brief ceremony in the Oval Office on Friday. The reporter from Time magazine had tweeted out that a bust of Martin Luther King had been removed from the Oval Office and later apologised when it proved to be untrue.
“There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable, and I’m here to tell you it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable as well,” Spicer said.
