[Spicer] said: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe.”
This, along with much else Spicer said, was plainly untrue. But there’s a strategy at work here. The Trump administration is creating a baseline expectation among its loyalists that they can’t trust anything said by the media. The spat over crowd size is a low-stakes, semi-comic dispute, but the groundwork is being laid for much more consequential debates over what is, and isn’t, true.
Source: Trump’s real war isn’t with the media. It’s with facts. – Vox
The Trump Administration is trying to spin the sparse turnout using classic “Big Lie” techniques. Ezra takes a deeper look, complete with links to reliable data sources and further analysis.
LC says
I think this is correct. There was that right wing talk show host who resigned who talked about it last year. The Right spent so many years targeting the media’s credibility that there is no one in the position of “trustworthy arbiter”. So doubling down immediately on the idea that “what the press tells you are lies” seems like a good strategy to minimize defections of the faithful.