【2003 Archives】

In the world of fake news003 Archives now we also have "alternative facts."

On Saturday, President Donald Trump's first full day in office, his press secretary Sean Spicer held a press conference in which he falsely claimed that the previous day's crowd was the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period."

Spicer's false remarks instantly became a new meme and sent the internet into a fury.

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, appeared on NBC's Meet The Press, where Chuck Todd grilled the Trump administration for spreading falsehoods on their first full day in office. In response, Conway called the falsehoods "alternative facts."

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Yes. Alternative facts. No, you aren't living in an alternative reality, this is real life.

The hashtag #AlternativeFacts quickly started trending on Twitter Sunday morning.

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In addition to Spicer complaining about the media's coverage of crowd size, Trump also complained during a briefing at the CIA headquarters on Saturday.

"We had a massive field of people. You saw that. Packed," said Trump. "I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, they show an empty field. I said, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there."

There is no official estimate of the crowd size on inauguration day, but there are some simple facts to prove it wasn't "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration."

According to the Washington Post, the D.C. Metro's ridership was "lower than that of an average weekday." About 570,557 people rode the Metro on Friday vs 1.1 million who rode it in 2009 during Obama's inauguration.

According to Nielson, 31 million viewers watched the inauguration on TV, which is lower than both Obama and Ronald Reagan's first inaugurations.

Spicer also claimed that magnetometers were used on the National Mall for Trump's inauguration and prevented "hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the mall as quickly as they had in years past."

A Secret Service spokesperson told CNNthat magnetometers were not used during the inauguration.

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The floor coverings Spicer mentioned, that was also a lie. Or, ya know, alternative facts.