Generally politicians are not honest but when, for example, have you really been able to believe ANYTHING that Trump or his administration said? I don't believe anything they say at all. I find this more useful than being deluded constantly like ignorant people often are.
If I want truth I'll go study philosophy which is where all sciences come from, but truth from any politician is dicey stuff. And Trump and the people around him are much worse than most politicians about being truthful about ANYTHING!
So, if you just think of people in the Trump administration a lot like someone talking to themselves on a street corner you won't go far wrong doing this. At least you won't be taken advantage of this way.
begin quote from:
The most important news here is not the crowd size, or whether Trump feuded with America’s …
TRENDING
Trump And His Press Secretary Flagrantly Lied On Their First Full Day In Office. That Matters.
Thankfully, some reporters are calling them out on it.
X
On Saturday, President Donald Trump’s
first full day in office, he gave a speech at CIA headquarters in which
he lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and falsely claimed that
he had never feuded with the U.S. intelligence community. Hours later,
his press secretary emerged from the West Wing, lied about the size of
the inaugural crowd and took no questions.
The most important news here is not
the crowd size, or whether Trump feuded with America’s spies (he did),
or even that the president and his press secretary lied. Politicians lie. What’s
remarkable is that the president and his administration chose to lie,
repeatedly, on their first full day on the job, about a relatively
trivial ― and easily checkable ― matter.
Journalists
should inform readers when the administration is not telling the truth.
They shouldn’t credulously promote Trump and his team’s falsehoods in
headlines and opening paragraphs, with the truth buried somewhere below.
They should focus attention on the fact that the administration lied,
not the content of the lie itself. Some media outlets did a good job of
this on Saturday. Others didn’t. (More on that below.)
Crowd sizes don’t matter that much. Although Trump enters office historically unpopular,
crowd sizes at inaugurations indicate very little about whether a
president is well-liked or likely to succeed. Weather can keep people
away. So can the cost: Attending inaugurations is expensive,
and Hillary Clinton, not Trump, carried the states closest to D.C. Many
Americans can’t afford to take off work for a day to drive or fly to
Washington for an inauguration. Nor does the number of people who attend
an inauguration affect a president’s ability to pass legislation.
“This
was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both
in person and around the globe,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer
claimed, falsely, Saturday evening.
Here’s
the truth, which exists even if the administration doesn’t want to
admit it: Fewer people attended Trump’s inauguration than attended some
previous inaugurations. Keith Still, a professor at Manchester
Metropolitan University and expert on crowd estimates, told The New York Times that,
based on photographs, he believed Trump’s crowd was about one-third the
size of the group that gathered for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.
There
is plenty of evidence that the Trump administration is wrong about the
crowd sizes that goes beyond what you can see with your own eyes. There
were only 570,000 trips taken on the Metro, Washington’s mass transit
system, on Friday ― the lowest total for an inauguration day since 2005.
(There were 1.1 million Metro trips on the day of Obama’s 2009
inauguration and 782,000 in 2013, according to WAMU’s Martin di Caro.)
Fewer people watched it on television, too. Some 30.6 million people watched Trump’s inauguration on TV, according to Nielsen ratings.
That’s 7 million or so fewer than watched Obama’s first inaugural ―
nearly 20 percent less. (Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration still holds
the record.)
And
in his statement Saturday, Spicer said, falsely, for the “first time in
our nation’s history that floor covering has been used to protect the
grass on the mall.” NBC Washington
reported in 2013 that workers were scrambling to put in place grass
protections ahead of Obama’s second inauguration. The press secretary
also claimed that magnetometers on the National Mall limited access to
the event. However, the Secret Service told CNN
that “no magnetometers were used on the National Mall for Trump’s
inauguration,” according to Jim Acosta. And Spicer claimed that the
crowd extended from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Photos show
that it did not. All of this was easily checkable.
These
falsehoods were so obvious ― and unnecessary ― that many in the news
media, from the reporters summoned to the White House on a Saturday
afternoon to others left in disbelief on Twitter, immediately pushed
back against Trump and his team’s nonsensical spin.
One of media’s principal failings during the 2016 campaign was not challenging the lies and other unsupported claims Trump uttered in interviews, on Twitter and in rambling speeches carried live on television. Trump’s unprecedented dishonesty as a candidate only continued as president-elect. And too often, news organizations continued falling into the trap of credulously amplifying his claims that have no basis in reality.
But perhaps the media is catching on now that Trump has taken office. On Saturday, several news organizations and journalists on Twitter quickly refuted Spicer’s bogus claim, with some even calling it a lie.
Although several New York Times journalists tweeted that Spicer lied, the paper initially framed his and Trump’s tirades as the pair having “accused the media of understating inauguration crowds.”
The Times’ first version of its story on the issue didn’t state high up that the accusations lacked merit. And the Times’ next tweet
on the incident focused on allegations of media bias, without noting
they were baseless. Although the Times didn’t use the “L word” when
updating its story, the paper took a stronger tone in a revised headline asserting that the White House’s crowd turnout claims were “false.”
CNN
also showed restraint Saturday in deciding not to air Spicer’s
statement live, which would have rewarded the White House with airtime
to promote false information.
CNN
later tweeted a report from media reporter Brian Stelter in which the
headline made clear that Spicer’s rant at reporters wasn’t justified.
Spicer
used his first appearance in the White House briefing room not only to
lie to the press, but also to chillingly admonish reporters about what
they “should be writing and covering.”
They shouldn’t listen.
Sam Levine contributed reporting.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2008. He was inaugurated in 2009.
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