Size Matters ... Media Deception?

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Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby elfismiles » Thu Jan 26, 2017 5:47 pm

Okay, I know this is the least important of issues right now but it speaks to the #AlternativeFacts #FakeNews #Gaslighting (of America by Trump, the MIC/PTB/Deep-State).

You've all undoubtedly seen the image comparisons that imply significantly fewer attendees at Trump's inauguration:

Image

See also... NYT and several other news outlets
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ref=oembed

Crowds at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony couldn’t fill the National Mall
https://qz.com/890683/trump-inauguratio ... ington-dc/

Watch a (SUSPICIOUSLY EDITED) timelapse of the National Mall on Inauguration Day
PBS NewsHour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdantUf5tXg

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/com ... on-crowds/

http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/22/ ... -size.html

AND YET ... all one has to do to see this is a FAKE NEWS MEME is look at CNN's own GigaPixel image:

Gigapixel: The inauguration of Donald Trump - CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/ ... gigapixel/
Explore a massive photo taken during Donald Trump's inauguration speech.

I'm not trying to support the tRump or demean the Women's March or anything like that ... just trying to ascertain WTF - how this gaslighting regarding one simple issue of crowd size went down.

Reminds me of ...

"Nothing is Real"; 'live' CNN coverage, 1991 Gulf
Post by Belligerent Savant » 10 Oct 2009

Image

Years after the operation, a US Army report admitted that the toppling of Saddam's statue had been engineered by a psychological operations group. The document states, "Our TPT (or Tactical Psyop Team) saw the... statue as a target of opportunity." A week earlier another psychological operation laid the groundwork for what followed. The script was for a female rambo to do a damsel in distress to be rescued by US armed forces.


The New Yorker propagandizes Saddam statue toppling
Post by Nordic » 04 Jan 2011 17:58
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30752
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011 ... ntPage=all

Reminder: Saddam Statue Was Toppled by Psy-Ops : NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=89489923
Apr 9, 2008 - For many people, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in ... They had interviewed an Army psychological operations' team leader and he ...
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 26, 2017 6:48 pm

haven't looked at all your links yet but did you see this?

Trump bragging about the photo he has hung in the White House ...but it has the Women's March date on it! :P

There's some ALTERNATIVE FACTS = AN EVIL STATECRAFT for ya

Image

Image
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Jan 26, 2017 7:27 pm

elfismiles » Thu Jan 26, 2017 4:47 pm wrote:Okay, I know this is the least important of issues right now but it speaks to the #AlternativeFacts #FakeNews #Gaslighting (of America by Trump, the MIC/PTB/Deep-State).

You've all undoubtedly seen the image comparisons that imply significantly fewer attendees at Trump's inauguration:

Image

See also... NYT and several other news outlets
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ref=oembed

Crowds at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony couldn’t fill the National Mall
https://qz.com/890683/trump-inauguratio ... ington-dc/

Watch a (SUSPICIOUSLY EDITED) timelapse of the National Mall on Inauguration Day
PBS NewsHour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdantUf5tXg

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/com ... on-crowds/

http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/22/ ... -size.html

AND YET ... all one has to do to see this is a FAKE NEWS MEME is look at CNN's own GigaPixel image:

Gigapixel: The inauguration of Donald Trump - CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/ ... gigapixel/
Explore a massive photo taken during Donald Trump's inauguration speech.

I'm not trying to support the tRump or demean the Women's March or anything like that ... just trying to ascertain WTF - how this gaslighting regarding one simple issue of crowd size went down.

Reminds me of ...

"Nothing is Real"; 'live' CNN coverage, 1991 Gulf
Post by Belligerent Savant » 10 Oct 2009

Image

Years after the operation, a US Army report admitted that the toppling of Saddam's statue had been engineered by a psychological operations group. The document states, "Our TPT (or Tactical Psyop Team) saw the... statue as a target of opportunity." A week earlier another psychological operation laid the groundwork for what followed. The script was for a female rambo to do a damsel in distress to be rescued by US armed forces.


The New Yorker propagandizes Saddam statue toppling
Post by Nordic » 04 Jan 2011 17:58
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30752
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011 ... ntPage=all

Reminder: Saddam Statue Was Toppled by Psy-Ops : NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=89489923
Apr 9, 2008 - For many people, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in ... They had interviewed an Army psychological operations' team leader and he ...


Thanks, miles. CNN casually proves itself to have been lying, yet liberals will simply ignore that proof and continue to lap up the original CNN lie (their very own "alternative fact"), because Trump because Trump because Trump.

Noted here too:

MacCruiskeen » Mon Jan 23, 2017 4:18 pm wrote:Thanks for that, Rocket Man. The appearance of those soldiers looks distinctly pre-arranged. Trump raises his finger (as if to give a signal), pauses, says "...magnificent", immediately turns round, nods toward the closed door, murmurs "thank you", and then the door opens and the soldiers appear. If he and the Secret Service hadn't been expecting it to happen, you'd certainly expect to see some baffled or worried reaction from him and from them.

Presidential inaugurations are not improvised like jam sessions.

Also, that film shows clearly that the crowd in the Mall was much bigger than the BBC, Reuters and the rest of the media pretended.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 26, 2017 7:44 pm

A crowd scientist says Trump’s inauguration attendance was pretty average
Trump got about a third of the crowd Obama got in 2009.
Updated by Sarah Frostenson@sfrostensonsarah.frostenson@vox.com Jan 24, 2017, 1:10pm EST

This Saturday very likely marked the largest day of demonstrations in American history. But Friday’s inauguration had, well, pretty average turnout for a presidential inauguration. And the new administration had a problem with that, as we saw with an alarming series of false statements from President Donald Trump and his press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday.

To try to settle the question of how many people attended the inauguration ceremony on the National Mall in Washington, DC, we reached out to Kevin Still, a professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. (He analyzed aerial shots of the crowds of both President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address and President Trump’s for the New York Times.) His conclusion is that the crowd on the Mall on Friday was roughly one-third the size of President Obama’s.

If Still is right, and Trump’s inauguration attracted a third of the 2009 crowd, then there were anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000 people on the Mall on Friday.

President Obama’s historic 2009 inaugural address drew 1.8 million people, which officials consider the largest gathering on the Mall ever. But as Still told Vox, not all 1.8 million were on the Mall — crowds extended behind the Washington Monument and outside the view of the aerial photos used in analysis.
Image
Chart showing historical attendance of presidential inaugurations
Sarah Frostenson
As you can see in the chart above, presidential inauguration attendance isn’t very consistent. In recent years, the first inauguration has been better attended than the second for a two-term president. But this wasn’t true for President George W. Bush — his second inauguration purportedly drew a larger crowd than the first.

The inaugural attendance numbers above largely come from various news outlets that arrived at these estimates through interviews and on-the-ground reporting with inauguration planners to assess crowd size. The National Park Service and the Office of the DC Mayor told me they won’t be releasing estimates of Friday’s event. (NPS was banned from releasing official crowd estimates after an especially controversial count involving attendance at the Million Man March in 1995. In 2009 it broke tradition and provided the 1.8 million estimate for Obama’s inauguration attendance.)

To be fair, the crowd looked big from Trump’s vantage point at the Capitol. But that’s also a terrible way to estimate crowd size.
Image
Image
From the podium, it does look like an endless sea of faces. But it’s also not how you measure crowd density. Scott Olson/Getty Images
As you can see in this tweet from Matt Viser at the Boston Globe, President Trump might have perceived a large crowd from the podium, but as you move farther down the Mall, the crowd is less tightly packed.
Image

“When you are barely above the head level of a crowd that extends back several hundred yards, it does look an unbroken sea of humanity,” said Steve Doig, a professor at Arizona State University with experience in estimating large crowds. “But people’s ability to estimate numbers bigger than what they can count on their fingers is not something we do well.”

Satellite imagery is the gold standard for estimating crowd size, but weather conditions Friday made this impossible
This is a satellite image taken from space that helped analysts measure crowd attendance at Obama’s inauguration in 2009.


Charles Seife, a mathematician and professor of journalism at New York University, has written about the perils of counting crowds. He told me that using satellite imagery is one of the best ways to measure the size of a crowd if it’s not a strictly ticketed event, but warned it’s not a perfect tool.

But unfortunately, given Friday’s inclement weather we’re unlikely to get comparable images with such clear resolution for the recent gatherings on the Mall.

Doig said that for future events, organizers and journalists should work to get real-time estimates that don’t rely on aerial photos, especially for large events in DC, as DC falls under a no-fly zone, making it difficult to get aerial shots to begin with.

Doig said one thing you could do to get reliable real-time estimates is to have a team of 20 or so people scattered throughout a large event, and have them measure by square feet how closely people are standing next to each other.

“I’d assign random locations for people to stand, and the key thing they’d have to report is how dense the crowd is, measuring it by square feet,” he said. “Then we’d use those estimates on a grid [of the Mall’s area] to average across and total up what we might think is an overall reasonable count.”

Doig thinks a methodology like this could be implemented relatively easily and only take 30 minutes or so to provide reasonably accurate estimates.

The Trump administration’s obsession with crowd size is really about a war on facts
As Vox’s Ezra Klein writes, what is truly frightening in how the Trump administration has responded to media stories covering the size of the crowd present at the inauguration is its apparent utter disregard for facts.

Among Spicer’s slew of falsehoods on Saturday was this: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe.”

This simply isn’t true. Metro ridership did not surpass 2009 levels, and television ratings indicate not as many people tuned in as they did in 2009 either.

And as Doig told me, “[Spicer] offered no reason for us to believe they have attempted to do a reality-based estimate of the crowd, other than quoting President Trump saying it looked like a million and a half [people].”

As my colleague Alvin Chang illustrates, the consequences of the Trump administration repudiating numbers it simply doesn’t agree with could have dangerous repercussions when it comes to government data sets we rely on for accuracy and the health of democracy.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ ... mp-average
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 26, 2017 7:48 pm

This thread makes me realize how much patrolling reduces my participation. That's probably a good thing, though.

I would like to share that, in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration, I had friends, family and co-workers in the DC metro area who expressed the same doubt about the coverage that day. It didn't square with what they saw and experienced. I didn't think much of it either way at the time.

While I don't doubt that Trump had smaller crowds than Barack, especially 2009 Barack, I also don't buy much of the sneering coverage about Donald's Empty Inauguration. Even so, I was surprised to see how much that narrative had been overstated when the resources Elfismiles links to in the OP came to light in recent days.

I am grateful that RI remains the kind of locale where obviously false media narratives about Trump can be laughed about & dissected without anyone misconstruing our shop talk as support for Trump.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 26, 2017 7:51 pm

BEWARE of those ALTERNATIVE FACTS = AN EVIL STATECRAFT

trump also said he saw thousands of muslims dancing in the streets and on the rooftops during 9/11

Trump Inauguration: (Crowd) Size Matters, So Who's Lying?
Not since “dressgate” has an optical illusion caused so much havoc.
Posted Jan 23, 2017

Facts matter. The truth matters. In general, it’s better to have true beliefs rather than false and (as Jamie Whyte says in Crimes Against Logic), “If someone is interested in believing the truth, then she will not take the presentation of contrary evidence and argument as some kind of injury.” (p. 16). That said, some truths are more important than others—and whether Trump’s inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s shouldn’t be an important issue. After all, why wouldn’t it be? Obama’s was the biggest crowd ever by leaps and bounds; Obama was the first African-American president and people are more apt to show up to witness historic events. The size of Trump’s crowd doesn’t tell us about what policies he is going to enact from the Oval Office and I’d much rather talk about what Trump is going to do (or not do) regarding climate change and education.

But Trump has managed to make the size of his inauguration crowd one of the most important issues on the planet now. How? Because he not only claimed, beforehand, that his would be bigger than Obama’s—he seems to be refusing to admit that it wasn’t. Indeed, he instructed his new press secretary (Sean Spicer) to say Trump’s crowd actually was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration” and to scold the media for publishing stories and evidence to the contrary. This included pictures that compared Obama’s and Trump’s crowd size that Spicer said “were intentionally framed in a way… to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.” Indeed, both Trump and Spicer claimed that the crowd went all the way back to the Washington Monument; Spicer even flanked himself with photos that supposedly proved it. To boot, Spicer threatened that Trump would begin to circumvent the media, and “take his message directly to the American people,” if the media continued with this kind of “dishonesty.” Worse still, when pressed on Meet The Press with evidence that Spicer was stating “falsehoods,” Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway said that Spicer was just presenting “alternate facts” and indicated that if the media doesn’t stop lying about the Trump administration, they may “have to rethink our relationship here.”

It seems that the Trump administration is trying to use this incident to justify cutting off the press—perhaps to even establish its own news network (akin to the government run “news” stations that citizens of Russia and North Korea enjoy). So determining who is lying here is really important. If Trump actually had the biggest inauguration crowd in history and the media is covering it up, that’s a serious problem. The media has a moral obligation to hold those in power accountable, but it must do so by telling the truth. But if the Trump administration is telling demonstrable outright lies and threatening to circumvent the media because it is correcting them, that is chilling. Without hyperbole, that is the kind of thing that ruthless dictators do.

Forty years ago (almost to the day), my favorite Sci-fi hero The Doctor reminded us that “the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views.” So who is altering the facts to fit their view? Is Trump lying, or is the media lying, about the size of Trump’s crowd?

What the media is saying

Spicer suggested that the media reports about the crowd’s size were a lie because the Park Service didn’t offer up any numbers. If you listen to Kellyanne Conway, we really have no way of knowing. "I don't think you can prove those numbers one way or another. There's no way to quantify crowd numbers." But not only is this a seeming appeal to ignorance (and if the administration really thought this was true, they should just say they don’t know whose crowd was bigger and leave it at that), this is simply false. While it would be virtually impossible to get an exact count, there is a science to estimating the size of crowds—and according to the experts, there were (at most) 600,000 at Trump’s inauguration and 1.8 million at Obama’s.

Another way to estimate crowd size is to figure out how many people used the D.C. Metro. According to Spicer, “We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit (on Trump's inaugural day), which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama's last inaugural.” (Notice that he is comparing Trump's numbers to Obama's second inaugural, which was smaller than his first.) He didn’t provide a source for where he got these numbers, but according to the WMATA (Washington Metropolotian Area Transit Authority) they are not accurate. The numbers for metro ridership actually break down like this:

By 11am: Obama's 1st, 513,000 / Obama's 2nd, 317,000, Trump's 193,000

All day: Obama's 1st, 1,100,000 / Obama's 2nd, 782,000, Trump's 570,557

But, of course, this is all according to the media—and the reliability of the media is part of the question here. Is there any way we could just tell for ourselves?

Well, not exactly. Although there is photographic evidence, it was provided by (at some stage) the media. So unless you took the pictures yourself, you can’t know (for sure) that they weren’t altered. But the Trump administration isn’t claiming that they were altered; they admit that they are real pictures. They just say they are misleading. And they’ve provided their own photographic evidence that seems to contradict the media’s. So with a little basic logic and critical thinking, I think we can get to the bottom of this. Whose pictures are misleading?

Javier Zarracina/Vox
Source: Javier Zarracina/Vox
The photographic evidence and that pesky white building.

By now you’ve seen the side by side comparison of Obama and Trump’s crowd. (CNN even has a fun one you were you can slide back and forth between the images.) As you can see, it seems to clearly show that Obama’s crowd was much bigger. But there are a number of excuses that have been floating around to suggest that comparing these photos is misleading.
Image
Some claim that the pictures were taken at different times of day. If the Trump picture was taken, say, at 7am, but Obama’s picture was taken at noon (right when the swearing-in happens), comparing the two pictures wouldn’t really be fair. But the picture of Trump’s crowd was taken only 26 minutes earlier than Obama’s (11:04 vs. 11:30). There is no way enough people showed up in 26 minutes to surpass the size of Obama’s crowd. Indeed, we know they didn’t because a time lapse video of the entire event shows that at no time did Trump’s crowd size approach anything close to Obama’s.

Now again, Spicer didn’t dispute their authenticity, but instead claimed that they were misleading because “This was the first time in our nation's history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.” But while it’s true that no floor coverings were used in 2009 for Obama’s inauguration, in order for this to be evidence that Trumps crowd surpassed Obama's, you have to think that “people” and “grass” in the Obama picture are indistinguishable. That’s clearly not the case. Large portions of the mall that are clearly empty in the Trump picture are clearly packed with people in the Obama picture.

But what about that picture that Spicer displayed that seemed to show a crowd that stretched all the way back to the Washington Monument?
Image
White House
Source: White House
Indeed, this picture has been making the rounds on social media with captions like “This is the real picture. Why does the media continue to push a false narrative?” On CNN, you can even find a 360 high resolution mega pixel photo that suggests that the above circulated photo is not altered and represents something very much like what Trump would have seen as he took the oath.

Ironically, however, it is this photo that is highly misleading (although not intentionally) and it is so for more than one reason. First of all, while we can easily compare the size of two crowds and see which is bigger, our native ability to estimate a crowd’s size by simply looking is highly inaccurate; and the bigger the crowd, the harder it is. This is why Trump’s assertion that he saw “like a million, million and a half people’ isn’t reliable evidence. (Notice that his own margin of error is half a million people!) Indeed, it’s well known that looking straight on at a crowd is a highly inaccurate way to estimate its numeric size. Our depth perception is not that reliable when it comes to long distances, and the more straight-on you are looking, the easier it is to miss blank spots in the crowd (and misperceive its size and density). And while this photo is not straight on, it clearly has a lot of depth. What you need is an overhead shot that essentially presents a flat image (like the split images above). Indeed, only if you zoom in on CNN 360 Mega Pixel version do you see the bare spots in the crowd that are easily seen in the above overhead photos.
Image
CNN 360 Mega Pixel
Source: CNN 360 Mega Pixel
Second of all (and much more importantly), the photo does not show the crowd going all the way back to the Washington monument—it goes back to a wide white building. That long white building (as far as I can tell) is new (it certainly wasn’t there during Obama’s inauguration). I don’t know what it is called, but it’s placement makes all the difference as to whether or not one can rightly say that Trump’s crowd stretched all the way back to the Washington Monument. As the CNN Mega Pixel photo above shows, you can see the Washington Monument and its flags behind that building, but because of the perspective you can’t tell how much distance there is between that building and the monument.

It took a while, but I finally found a picture that clearly depicts where that building lies.
Image
Lucas Jackson, Stelios Varias
Source: Reuters: Lucas Jackson, Stelios Varias
As you can see, it lies right beyond “the curve” on the right. According to this official map of the mall, that curve is created by the Smithsonian (14), which places the white building on the walkway between The National Museum of American History Museum (2) and The National Museum of Natural History (3). This means that there are still four large sections of grass behind that building, before you even get to the area in front of the Washington Monument. Now, the picture also shows that two of those grass areas are also covered by white buildings—but even if they are packed full of people, there is no way there are as many people as there were during Obama’s inauguration on those same sections of grass.

So it’s demonstrably the case that not only was Obama’s crowd denser than Trump’s, but it went much further back on the mall. Clearly Trump’s crowd was not the biggest ever.

Conclusion: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” Donald J. Trump, Jan 11, 2017.

This means that the media is not lying about the size of Trump’s crowd, and the Trump administration’s outrage on this matter is completely unjustified. Now, to be fair, I can understand how it may have looked to Trump, from his perspective during the inauguration, that the crowd went all the way back to the Washington Monument. Indeed, if you compare what Obama and Trump would have seen from their perspective, they don’t look that different.
Image
White House
Source: White House
The distance, that white building…it essentially created an optical illusion for Trump. But I know that Trump has seen the photos from the other perspective; he’s talked about them. And Trump now has access to all the resources of the White House: surely he has the ability to evaluate the evidence as well as I can from my living room. So he knows his crowd wasn’t as big as Obama’s.

This can only mean that the Trump administration is not only knowingly and willfully lying about verifiably false things, they are commanding the media to repeat their lies or lose access to the White House.

Instead of elaborating on how worrisome this is, I will simply leave you with a quote.

"The Party told you to reject all evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." - George Orwell, “1984"

Update: I was able to convince a Trump supporter, who had posted Spicer's picture as evidence of media dishonesty, with the evidence I presented here. He admitted that he was wrong and that Trump's crowd was smaller. The exchange was pleasant overall. He deleted the original post, along with the entire thread, in under an hour.

Update: According to PBS, "On Tuesday, the president tweeted a photograph from the inauguration taken from an angle that accentuated the crowd and said he planned to hang the image in the press area of the White House." This indicates that Trump may not be intentionally lying but instead may actually believe his crowd was bigger (merely based on the evidence of his own experience). While some may think this is more comforting, this is actually worse than him intentionally lying. Not only does he seem oblivious to the shortcomings of personal experience (which can easily lead one astray), he is either unable to unwilling to revise his belief in light of contrary evidence. In other words, he always trusts his own experience over and above evidence. Not only does this mean that he can never realize when he is wrong about something, but it means that he is prone to delusion--and he is threatening to cut off the media if they contradict his delusions.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lo ... whos-lying
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Jan 26, 2017 8:19 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jan 26, 2017 6:48 pm wrote:This thread makes me realize how much patrolling reduces my participation. That's probably a good thing, though.

I would like to share that, in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration, I had friends, family and co-workers in the DC metro area who expressed the same doubt about the coverage that day. It didn't square with what they saw and experienced. I didn't think much of it either way at the time.

While I don't doubt that Trump had smaller crowds than Barack, especially 2009 Barack, I also don't buy much of the sneering coverage about Donald's Empty Inauguration. [...]


Yes. The question is not so much the actual size of the crowd as the poverty of the "evidence" used to show that the crowd was allegedly so tiny. There is not even a timestamp on those (edited) timelapse films. Yet they instantly go viral. A snickering world is grateful for that shit. Tweet, retweet, Like it on FB.

It reminds me of the time, before the election, when that rightwing hack (Foley?) used a concealed camera to expose the Dem Party's semi-outsourced scumbaggery in bribing homeless or mentally-ill people to risk getting their faces punched at Trump rallies, so that the Dems could use footage of the punch-up for their own hypocritical publicity. There were people, on this board and elsewhere, who refused to even notice what that film actually showed, because it showed something they preferred not to acknowledge.

Expect more and more of this dismal stuff, day in day out, for years. Full Spectacle Dominance. There is not a hope of any serious opposition to Trump unless and until people actually get real, and that means not pretending that the corporate media is your friend and that crap is caviar.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 26, 2017 9:08 pm

Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his claims about inauguration crowd

By Karen Tumulty and Juliet Eilperin January 26 at 7:42 PM
On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.

In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.

Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.

For Trump, who sees himself and his achievements in superlative terms, the inauguration’s crowd size has been a source of grievance that he appears unable to put behind him. It is a measure of his fixation on the issue that he would devote part of his first morning in office to it — and that he would take out his frustrations on an acting Park Service director.

Trump questions media reports of inauguration crowd size Play Video1:37
President Trump questioned media reports and photographs that showed the size of Inauguration Day crowds, speaking to CIA employees at CIA headquarters on Jan. 21 in Langley, Va. (The Washington Post)
Word rapidly spread through the agency and Washington. The individuals who informed The Washington Post about the call did so on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the conversation.

Neither Reynolds nor the Park Service would talk about it.

“The National Park Service does not comment on internal conversations among administration officials,” agency spokesman Thomas Crosson said.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the call simply demonstrated that Trump’s management style is to be “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

“He’s not somebody who sits around and waits. He takes action and gets things done,” Sanders said. “That’s one of the reasons that he is president today, and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”

On Saturday, the same day Trump spoke with Reynolds, the new president used an appearance at CIA headquarters to deliver a blistering attack on the media for reporting that large swaths of the Mall were nearly empty during the event.

“It’s a lie,” Trump said. “We caught [the media]. We caught them in a beauty.”


The scene in Washington on Inauguration Day
View Photos Trump supporters and protesters gather in the capital as a new presidency begins.
“It looked like a million, a million and a half people,” Trump said, vastly inflating what the available evidence suggested.

[Federal agencies ordered to restrict their communications]

Later that day, White House press secretary Sean Spicer reiterated Trump’s complaints about media coverage of the crowd in a tongue-lashing from the lectern of the briefing room.

“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Spicer said.

The Park Service does not release crowd estimates. Experts, however, have estimated that the 2017 turnout was no more than a third the size of Obama’s eight years earlier.

Reynolds was taken aback by Trump’s request, but he did secure some additional aerial photographs and forwarded them to the White House through normal channels in the Interior Department, the people who notified The Post said. The photos, however, did not prove Trump’s contention that the crowd size was upward of 1 million.

Reynolds, who had served as the Park Service’s deputy director of operations for six months before assuming the post of acting director, is a third-generation employee who has worked there for more than 30 years. As deputy director, he oversaw the Park Service’s $2.8 billion budget and more than 22,000 employees.

In the days since Trump’s election, the Park Service has become an unlikely protagonist in a battle between the new president and some career government employees.

The trouble began late Friday, when the agency’s official Twitter account retweeted two messages that could be perceived as critical of the new administration: the one comparing the relative crowd size for Trump’s inauguration to that of Obama’s 2009 swearing-in, and another that noted policy pages that had been removed from the White House’s website.

That prompted an “urgent directive” to Interior employees that they “shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” which was lifted early Saturday morning. Crosson then apologized on Twitter for “mistaken RTs from our account.”

On Tuesday, the Badlands National Park’s Twitter account became a social-media sensation when it posted four tweets in a row about rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and the threats posed by climate change.

Those tweets were then deleted. An NPS official later explained that Badlands NPS officials learned they were posted by a former employee who still had access to the account, and decided to remove them.

[Interior Department reactivates Twitter accounts after shutdown following inauguration]

Spicer told reporters this week that White House officials had not dictated any agency to impose new restrictions on public communications and that some federal officials, such as those at the Park Service, were not in compliance with their own department’s policies.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued to press the argument that the media has given a misleading account of the crowds that attended his inauguration.

“I had a massive amount of people here,” the president told ABC News anchor David Muir in an interview Wednesday. “They were showing pictures that were very unflattering, as unflattering — from certain angles — that were taken early and lots of other things.”

As he guided Muir through the West Wing, Trump paused at a photo on the wall, taken from behind him as he delivered his inaugural address: “Here’s a picture of the event. Here’s a picture of the crowd. Now, the audience was the biggest ever, but this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.”

Brady Dennis and Lisa Rein contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... c91c792285
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Jan 26, 2017 9:51 pm

That social influences shape every person’s practices, judgments and beliefs is a truism to which anyone will readily assent. A child masters his “native” dialect down to the finest nuances; a member of a tribe of cannibals accepts cannibalism as altogether fitting and proper. All the social sciences take their departure from the Observation of the profound effects that Groups exert on their members. For psychologists, group pressure upon the minds of individuals raises a host of questions they would like to investigate in detail.

How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes? This question is especially pertinent in our day. The same epoch that has witnessed the unprecedented technical extension of communication has also brought into existence the deliberate manipulation of opinion and the “engineering of consent.” There are many good reasons why, as citizens and as scientists, we should be concerned with studying the ways in which uman beings form their opinions and the role that social conditions play.

Studies of these questions began with the interest in hypnosis aroused by the French physician Jean Martin Charcot (a teacher of Siqmund Freud toward the end of the 19th century.) ...

- Solomon E. Asch, Opinions and Social Pressure, 1955

http://kosmicki.com/102/Asch1955.pdf
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby brekin » Thu Jan 26, 2017 10:16 pm

Everyone having fun?
Yup.
Boy that 3 Doors Down can really rock it.
Yup.
You apply for that State Department job?
Yup.


Image

What is kind of funny is that about half the time there is controversy about a conspiracy or scam that didn't happen.
The voting fraud, size of the inauguration crowd, what next?
I mean there is technology right now that could have made the inauguration crowd seem enormous if Trump actually controlled the media.
But he has to play the disgruntled cry baby after the fact, if he was more anticipatory, calculating and nefarious many would be challenging the counter narrative he is championing.
Oh, wee little dictator duckling learning to fly.

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If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 26, 2017 10:24 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jan 27, 2017 11:41 am

Thanks y'all ...

I still suspect that either Reuters' Jim Bourg or his photographer Lucas Jackson are fudging the timestamp on that picture.

I am seeing a lot of inaccurate talk and allegations online about the crowd photos from Friday's Trump inauguration that are simply not borne out by the FACTS. Now I see my own friends reposting this disinformation on Facebook.

Only one news organization had a still photographer atop the Washington monument for the inauguration and I assigned him to be there. This photo by Reuters News Pictures staff photographer Lucas Jackson was taken at 12:01:18 p.m. on Friday and not much earlier as many people are trying to claim.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... 417&type=3


... and again wonder about the obviously edited PBS timelapse video.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 27, 2017 12:32 pm

I LOVE YA MAN :hug1: :hug1: :lovehearts: :lovehearts: :lovehearts:


but a PBS timelapse video focus at the same time we just lost our first war declared by trumpy against Mexico is a bit trivial ...that would be a trump trivial not a elf trivial ... elfismiles does not do trivial


PICTURE THIS


a small minded idiot narcissistic baby president trumpy was so concerned about his crowd size that 12 hours after he was sworn in made a call to the park service demanding photos showing different results..NEVER has a president called the park service for shit like this


that's what the new president was focused on A PHOTO!

for our new president SIZE DOES MATTER A WHOLE FUCKIN LOT


and that's what he wants everyone to be focused on..........

ALTERNATIVE FACTS = AN EVIL STATECRAFT
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jan 27, 2017 12:46 pm

seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 27, 2017 11:32 am wrote: ...that would be a trump trivial not a elf trivial ... elfismiles does not do trivial


And I'm surprised to see you, of all people, policing what other people post about on RI, especially given the conversations you've been having this week.

Trump isn't the only actor capable of gaslighting, and what's being discussed here is a psyop that DJT had nothing to do with, because it was aimed squarely at him. PBS, CNN, and NYT set the tone on this one, and then they get to sit back and watch the entire Trump Spokesteam bluster over a photo and look crazy doing it because there's already 24 hours of heavy coverage setting the tone / establishing the conversation.

Trump is smart, but he's not omnipotent.

Yet. Once Dugin shows up with the Necronomicon, the Ascension begins.
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Re: Size Matters ... Media Deception?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 27, 2017 12:51 pm

I wasn't policing anyone ...my exact words were elfismiles does not do trivial and I meant that and was in no way policing anyone especially elf and he knows where I was coming from

that's why I said that

but let's ask elf what he thought of my post

and I am not really fond of the "policing"/personal attacks Mac and crew has been repeatedly/constantly doing to me for the last 5 months...when they do it to me their posts do NOT start with hearts and love

if you take a second look at the latest you will see it was not ME that brought up the policing of RI it was Karm that was trying to do the policing ...I was defending people at RI to post want they want ..here is his post that started it all ...please explain to me why this is not his version of policing? What am I missing?

There seems to be a grasping at anything related to Trump to be critical of. Some stuff is just fluff, with little to no significance. Why should we care if his approval rating in high, low or in the shitter? Is this HuffPo or RI?


I know things have been difficult here lately and I know you are a fair person ..I appreciate that
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Fri Jan 27, 2017 1:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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