Was Trump Right About His Inauguration’s Crowd Size?
1 Power Line by John Hinderaker
Apart from the overhyped “women’s” marches, yesterday’s biggest news story seemed to be the conflict between the news media and the Trump administration over the size of the inauguration crowd. The liberal media said it was small, relying largely on this photo comparison by the New York Times of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and Trump’s:
Other media happily followed suit with lowball estimates of Friday’s crowd. Two points: one, there is not, and never will be, an official estimate of crowd size for either the 2009 inauguration or last Friday’s. The National Park Service stopped doing such estimates in the 1990s. Two, the issue normally would be analyzed by looking at satellite photos, but Friday was too cloudy for such pictures. Hence the uncertainty.
The obvious question, of course, is when the Times’s photo of Trump’s inauguration was taken. Brit Hume–a far more reliable source than the New York Times–weighed in on Twitter:
Others took photos while the inauguration was in progress, and they appear to show a much larger crowd. E.g.:
Areas in the Mall that look white in photos were blocked off for security reasons:
Independent Journal Review has the full story. The Left’s “fact checkers,” of course, have already swung into action, proclaiming Trump wrong.
I don’t doubt that the crowd for Obama’s first inauguration was larger than the one on Friday; among other things, no one was kept away in 2009 by threats of riots. But it does seem that the Times and other press outlets have been caught, once again, trying to minimize Donald Trump’s achievements and support. |
