Media swing back at Trump in fight over inauguration crowd size

Appearing at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters Saturday afternoon, Trump delivered a speech to some 300 CIA agents and admitted he has a “running war with the media.” He accused the media of telling a “beauty” of a lie about the attendance numbers and declared that the crowd for his big moment at the U.S. Capitol stretched all the way across Mall to the Washington Monument.

In his remarks, Trump referred to the several outlets that ran stories that included side-by-side pictures of Trump’s and Obama’s inaugurations, with photographs of Trump’s crowds appearing noticeably thinner than Obama’s crowds.

“I turn on, by mistake, I get this network, and it showed an empty field,” Trump said. “And it said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that’s not bad. But it’s a lie. We had 250,000 people literally around in the little ball that we constructed, that was 250,000 people. The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, it was packed. So we caught them and we caught them in a beauty and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”

Immediately after Trump’s speech, the Associated Press shot back that Trump “wrongly” described the scene on the Mall.

“BREAKING: President Donald Trump accuses media of lying about inauguration crowds, wrongly says crowd reached Washington monument,” the news outlet tweeted. AP also ran a fact-check on the president, which concluded that he “overstates” his inauguration numbers.

The Boston Globe’s Matt Viser left no room for doubt in his critique of Trump’s crowd size claim.

“There are far more important things to be concerned with, but: Donald Trump is absolutely, 100% lying about his inauguration crowd size,” Viser tweeted.

Obama’s first inauguration crowd on the Mall in 2009 (estimated to be 1.9 million people) is generally accepted to be the largest in history. He followed that up with an impressive estimated 1 million people in 2013. George W. Bush’s largest crowd was an estimated 400,000 in 2005 and Bill Clinton’s was 800,000 in 1993.

Trump’s crowd figures have yet to be compiled, but before the event the Homeland Security Department and the D.C. Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and U.S. Armed Forces Joint Task Force-National Capital Region said they were planning and preparing for up to 900,000 people.

Hours after Trump’s speech, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, doubled down on the president’s assertions. Flanked by screens showing a bird’s-eye view of the inauguration crowds, Spicer told a packed James S. Brady Briefing Room in the White House that Trump’s inauguration drew “the largest crowd ever.”

That earned Spicer a “Pants on Fire” lie rating from Politifact.

He also reminded reporters that “no one had numbers” to confirm how many attendees were at Trump’s swearing-in ceremony.

Spicer focused on the number of riders who accessed the D.C. metro system on Friday, arguing the 420,000 people who rode the train surpassed the 317,000 people who rode the metro on the day of Obama’s 2013 inauguration.

However, in Jan. 2013, the Washington Post reported that 797,787 people rode the metro on the day of Obama’s inauguration. CNN later confirmed nearly identical numbers with the same result: Obama ahead.

Spicer pinned some blame on 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.”

But outlets reported that the Secret Service didn’t think that the magnetometers impacted crowd size.

Spicer also blamed new floor coverings used on the Mall, which he said skewed the view of the Mall from over-head images showing crowd size. He said such photos “had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.”

But as CNN’s Jim Acosta pointed out, crews laid out floor coverings for Obama’s inauguration in 2013 as well.

Also of note were a string of reports that anti-Trump protesters had blocked several entrances to the mall, preventing people from entering. The Secret Service, however, repeatedly asserted on Twitter that all of its checkpoints were open.

Even on the TV broadcast front, Trump couldn’t catch a break, as reports late Saturday said he mustered only 30.6 million viewers, which was down 19 percent from Obama’s inauguration in 2009 according to Nielsen estimates. But that doesn’t seem to factor in the number of people who tuned in online, via livestreams, as social media and YouTube become ever bigger players in the sharing and consuming of media.