These days my first assumption when I see a report in the news media is that it’s a lie unless I can prove otherwise. Why would I make such a whacky assumption, you may ask? Well, we’re talking about an industry that promotes lying liars to the pinnacle of their profession, like Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and Dan Rather. (If you don’t already know why I say they’re liars, please do click the links.) And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, lying journalist-wise, so when they accuse someone of lying, I always assume the person is telling the truth. It’s a Bizarro World way of looking at the news, I know, but usually it works out because they’re almost always truly lying.
For example, take the dust-up over Trump’s claim in a speech to the CIA that the crowd at his inauguration was “yuuge!” The news media says he lied, so I decided to check out his speech for myself. You can see it too, by following this link to the Mirror, which posted a video of the whole thing. If you start watching at the 12:00 minute mark, you’ll hear Trump’s own words about the crowd size at his inauguration, instead of the Bizarro World version the media has been publishing. What he actually said was this:
“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.”
Was that a lie?
Everyone in the mainstream media from CNN to The New York Times has piously proclaimed it was. To support their accusation they’ve been plastering a photo all over the place, which the photographer claims was shot at 12:01, while Trump was taking the oath of office. (I found a copy of the photo here, at the Daily Mail.) The photo shows a lot of empty space in the mall around the monument. But here’s the question you have to ask if you think most of these people are liars who are lying:
Was the photo really taken when they say it was, during the oath of office?
To believe that, you would have to believe the liars are not lying, which I don’t. But even if the photo really was taken during Trump’s oath, does that really mean Trump lied?
Umm… no.
Of course, nobody can get inside Trump’s head to know what he truly thought…
When you read the news media accounts of Trump’s CIA speech, most of them make it sound like he claimed there were a million and a half people at his inauguration. But look at Trump’s actual words again:
“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.”
Notice what he actually said. “…it looked like a million and a half people…all the way to the Washington monument.” Get that? He didn’t say there were a million and a half people. He said it looked that way to him.
Of course, nobody can get inside Trump’s head to know what he truly thought about what he saw. So are the lying liars in the media willing to claim he’s lying about what it looked like to him? Probably, because you know, liars gonna lie. But here’s a photo which was also taken during the oath of office, not from the top of the Washington monument, but from behind Donald Trump, looking out toward the monument:
Now, I ask you, from Trump’s point of view, doesn’t it look like the crowd “went all the way to the Washington monument?” It sure does to me. Whether that’s what a million and a half people looks like, I don’t know, because I’ve never seen that many people. And neither has Donald Trump. most likely. Up to that day the biggest crowd he had ever addressed was probably at one of his many heavily attended campaign stops. Even the Quicken Loans Arena, where he addressed the Republican National Convention, only holds 20,562 people. So if Trump was mistaken in his estimate, it’s an understandable mistake because, holy cow, look at all those people!
And out here in the real world, a mistake is not a lie.
