Shortly after his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump launched an all-out war on the media, which he labelled “among the most dishonest human beings on earth”.
Trump made the comment during a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Virginia on Saturday. “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.”
US President Donald Trump listens during a swearing in ceremony of White House senior staff in the East Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. /CFP Photo
The new American president accused the media of fabricating his tensions with the intelligence community and praised Mike Pompeo, his nominee to head the CIA, vowing “a thousand percent” support for the agency.
In the meantime, Trump claimed that it “looked like a million and a half people” had attended his inauguration on Friday, criticizing the media for indicating much lower attendance at the ceremony than the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.
“Pictures shared on social media appeared to show acres of empty space on Washington DC's National Mall where an estimated 1.8 million people stood to see his predecessor in 2009,” according to an article in The Independent.
This pair of photos shows a view of the crowd on the National Mall at the inaugurations of President Barack Obama, above, on January 20, 2009, and President Donald Trump, below, on January 20, 2017. /Reuters Photo
However, Trump insisted that the reports were false. “We had a massive field of people, you saw them – packed,” he said. “Honestly it looked like a million and a half people, whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington monument.”
His press secretary Sean Spicer also attacked the media for “deliberate false reporting”, claiming that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period – both in person and remote.”
"Photographs of the inauguration process were intentionally framed in a way ... to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall," Spicer said.
According to The Independent, the attendance for the Trump inauguration was estimated at approximately 250,000.
Other members of Trump’s team echoed the attacks against the media. Reince Priebus, chief of staff of the White House, said there was "an obsession... to de-legitimize this president. We're not going to sit around and take it." He vowed to “fight back tooth and nail every day and twice on Sunday”.
Kellyanne Conway, a top aide of Trump, emphasized that Spicer had presented "alternative facts" regarding the inauguration. When challenged by NBC host Chuck Todd, Conway threatened to “rethink our relationship”.
She also criticized the Time Magazine reporter who incorrectly reported that a bust of civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.
Britain’s Financial Times said that Trump’s war on the media had set the tone “for his aggressive style of leadership”. The report believed that Trump’s frequent use of social media reflected his intention “to both circumvent the mainstream media and influence its coverage of him”.
In the view of David Yelland, founder of media consultant Kitchen Table Partners, former editor of The Sun and former deputy editor of the New York Post, it was unwise for President Trump to start a war against the media on his first day in office. “You cannot start a four-year relationship with the media by attacking them. It is just astonishingly and breathtakingly arrogant. This is amateur hour,” he told Financial Times.
