The White House vowed today to fight the news media "tooth and nail" over what officials see as unfair attacks on US President Donald Trump, setting a tone that could ratchet up a traditionally adversarial relationship to a new level of rancour.
A day after the Republican president used his first visit to CIA headquarters to accuse the media of underestimating the crowds at his inauguration, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus expressed indignation at the reports and referred to them as "attacks".
"The point is not the crowd size. The point is the attacks and the attempt to delegitimise this president in one day. And we're not going to sit around and take it," Mr Priebus said on Fox News Sunday.
Wow, television ratings just out: 31 million people watched the Inauguration, 11 million more than the very good ratings from 4 years ago!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017
Mr Priebus complained about a press pool report that said the bust of Martin Luther King Jr had been removed from the Oval Office. The report on Friday night was quickly corrected but Mr Trump called out the reporter by name at the Central Intelligence Agency yesterday, as did spokesman Sean Spicer later in the day.
"We're going to fight back tooth and nail every day and twice on Sunday," Mr Priebus said.
The chief of staff also repeated Mr Spicer's accusations that the media manipulated photographs of the National Mall to show smaller crowds at Friday's inauguration.
Aerial photographs showed the crowds for Mr Trump's inauguration were smaller than in 2009, when Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, was sworn in.
"This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe," Mr Spicer said in a brief statement yesterday. "These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm about the inauguration are shameful and wrong."
The unexpectedly high turnout for yesterday's Woman's March on Washington outpaced the inauguration turnout.
The Washington subway system reported 275,000 rides of as of 4pm Irish time yesterday.
The subway system said 193,000 users had entered the system by the same time on Friday, compared with 513,000 at that time during Mr Obama's 2009 inauguration.
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