PD Editorial: Thumbs down: Waging war with ‘alternative facts’

The nation’s new president seems to enjoy adjectives of the extreme, so we will start with this one: abysmal. That’s the only way to describe his - and his press secretary’s - first day of interactions with the press on Saturday.

It started with the president’s speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he attempted to mend his relationship with the intelligence community not with an apology but by blaming the news media. “I have a running war with the media, they are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth,” he said. “They sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. The reason you are the number one stop is exactly the opposite.”

Yes, this is the same Donald J. Trump who, in tweets and in remarks at a news conference, had criticized U.S. intelligence officials for using underhanded tactics to smear him, saying it was “disgraceful” and was “something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”

Trump also blasted the news media for what he said was unfairly representing the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Later in the day, Press Secretary Sean Spicer also lashed out at the White House press corps for “deliberately false” and “reckless” reporting.

So what were these sins of the Fourth Estate? A reporter from Time magazine erroneously tweeted that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office, when it had merely been moved. (The tweet was quickly corrected.) Spicer then argued that photos of the inaugural crowd were posted in a way to deliberately misrepresent the numbers of those attending.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration - period,” Spicer claimed.

Really? Based on what? Comparison aerial shots of the crowd gathered on the National Mall for the Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and the one on Friday clearly shows a smaller turnout for the latter. Making it worse, Spicer backed his assertions with some questionable numbers. He said 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit on Jan. 20, 2017, compared with 317,000 for President Obama’s 2013 inaugural. But those numbers conflict with the transist system’s own data. The Washington Post reported that there were roughly 570,557 trips in the D.C. transit system between 4 a.m. and midnight on Friday. Inauguration day 2013 drew some 220,000 more.

Following its analysis, the fact-checking web site PolitiFact listed Spicer’s contention that Friday’s inauguration drew the largest audience ever to be “pants on fire” false.

It didn’t help relations that after blasting the media for five minutes, Spicer left the briefing room without taking questions.

This then set the stage for what was perhaps the most Orwellian moment of the weekend. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, host Chuck Todd asked Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway why Spicer would make the “largest audience” claim when the evidence clearly shows otherwise. “Sean Spicer, our press secretary - gave alternative facts,” she said.

Hmmm. Is that a reference to facts from some parallel universe? In the future, Spicer might at least do reporters and the public a favor and let them know in advance whether press briefings will be dealing with real facts or alternative ones. That’s if they plan to offer both.