Last week the mainstream media devoted huge resources of time and space to comparing photos of President Obama’s inauguration audience to photos of President Trump’s inauguration audience. Apparently audience size matters because major news media all over the US wouldn’t let go of the subject for an entire week. Their claims that Trump had a comparatively tiny audience became so important to the newly elected president that his press secretary, Sean Spicer, devoted his first press meeting to attacking the media he will have to work with for the next four years over what he claimed were false representations.

The press fought back by saying the story was important because Donald Trump lied when he said through Spicer and his own tweets that his audience was as big as Obama’s — that it was, in fact, the biggest ever — and that it stretched all the way from where he stood to the Washington Monument. Many in the media claimed the president was lying and that the president was clearly obsessed with himself for making such a big deal out of this and spending his nights tweeting about it. They said the president was attacking the media for simply reporting the truth that it is obliged to tell.

The following photos will show who was really obsessed and who was driving this story to the undeserved importance that it got:

 

Can honest photos lie?

 

Sometimes it is not the lie you tell but the truth that you manipulate that creates the lie. Here is the photo comparison that went around the world last week where it is perfectly obvious which president had the larger inauguration crowd:

 

 

Oh my gosh, who cannot possibly tell from looking at these photos that Trump’s small hands clearly also translate into small audiences? The Obama crowd has packed the place, but Trump’s minuscule clusters almost look like they’re huddling for mutual support. Both photos are completely true. Both were taken at essentially the same time. There is no photoshopping. So, clearly the dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream media outlets that ran the comparison photos or other photos very much like them, were telling the truth! The new presidents audience is practically nonexistent.

 

Oh, but wait a minute …

 

… and scroll down …

 

 

 

 

Here is another photo taken of Trump’s audience at the time of his inauguration:

 

 

 

 

 

Well, no wonder President Trump said that, from where he stood on the capital steps as he gave his inaugural address, his audience packed the mall from the capital building all the way to the Washington Monument. Is this even the same event as the one shown around the world by many major media corporations?

As it turns out, the only thing the fakestream media’s comparison photos actually reveal is whose audience — Trump’s or Obama’s — arrived first!

The comparison photos were each taken about an hour before the inauguration speech began. The third photo of the huge Trump audience was taken at the time of the inauguration. It was all a matter of timing. To explain why Obama’s crowd surged into the mall an hour or so earlier than Trump’s, consider the following likely explanations:

 

• Obama’s crowd gathered on a bright and sunny day. Trump’s crowd attended on a rainy day. People don’t like to stand in the rain, so perhaps Trump’s supporters have enough sense come in out of the rain for as long as they can until the event is ready to begin.
• Obama’s audience had more reason to arrive early. They were attending a unique historic event — the inauguration of America’s first Black president — in which position of the audience on the lawns of the mall is on a first-come-first-serve basis. People wanting to attend might reasonably think they would not even find standing room at a first-of-its-kind event and so would go extra early to make sure they reserved a space for themselves.
• Nearly a hundred protest groups, made up largely of Democrats who said they refused to accept the election results (after castigating Donald Trump for not being willing to say before the election that he would accept the results no matter what) said they were coming with the intentions of diminishing the event. Many of those groups said they would do all they could to block streets and block access points to try to make sure the inauguration couldn’t even happen. With such determination and planning, might they have actually managed to slow down people’s ability to get to the mall … just a little?
• With so many protests going on, Trump’s supporters might have lallygagged in route to watch some of the action.
• Because of the numerous threats of violence, the security fences set up around the mall had fewer access points onto the mall, through which everyone had to be screened. Couldn’t fewer access points have caused it to take longer for the crowds to get through?

 

Here is a another comparison photo taken of Obama’s inauguration during his speech from the same direction as the Trump inauguration speech photo.

 

 

 

Holy smokes! Obama’s first inauguration audience is still massively bigger, erupting clear out onto the streets.

Oh, wait a second. That photo, used by many media outlets for comparison with Trump’s audience, was taken from the balcony of the Capital Building. The photo taken for Trump’s audience was shot from much closer to ground level and was taken from approximately the center of the Obama inauguration photo. Thus, it misses all the audience gathered on the bleachers and is narrower so it doesn’t even include the side streets.

Was Obama’s audience bigger? Probably, but it’s hard to tell from the photos. I think I can see a hint of white space still showing among Trump’s crowd in the far distance of the third photo … if I put a jeweler’s loop in one eye. I would imagine Obama’s inauguration was better attended because many people waited all their lives to see a Black president, and it took place on a beautiful sunny day. In fact, I would hope it was bigger because it was a major historical milestone. I find it impressive, therefore, that the crowd that gathered to watch the 44th White man to get inaugurated was almost as large as the nation’s first Black presidential inauguration in a city with a large Black population.

If you want to compare Trump to another very popular White president, let’s look at William Jefferson Clinton’s second inauguration:

 

 

Now I can see all kinds of wide-open lawn out on the mall. So, it turns out that, when judged against popular liberal presidents, Trump’s audience was quite large after all!

 

And that’s how you create fake news through true photos.

 

First, pick a time of day where photos from the same timeframe happen to work well for diminishing the apparent audience of the president whose inauguration you want to diminish. People will naturally think that taking the photos at almost the same time must surely makes them the fairest possible comparison, never mind that it was before the event was actually happening and that many things about the day were different. Second, pick comparison photos that appear to be from the same angle but that are really narrower and closer in for the president whose inauguration you wish to minimize. Third, present it all as fact … because it is! Carefully chosen facts to present the story you want to create.

Here’s a more important question: Was there even enough difference between Trump’s inauguration audience and Obama’s to merit making a story out of it, much less spreading the story all over the globe, much less going on about it for a week, much less grilling the president’s spokespeople about why the president lied about his audience size as Chuck Todd did on NBC for an entire thirteen minutes, during which he referred to Kellyanne Conway’s statements as “ridiculous” and claimed that her “alternative facts” were “falsehoods?”