Nope. It’s just going to be anecdotes and feelings from here on out. If we have 8% unemployment, we’ll just be told we should feel great about the economy now.

Or just look at Kansas. The economy failed to boom after the tax cuts as Gov. Brownback promised, and so he’s now cut the reports (after a previous attempt to hide it from the public) that provided the economic metrics used to evaluate whether or not the plan was a success.

I stand corrected!

I suggest you check out my Ricochet piece linked in the original post which includes this link to a PBS side-by-side in which the 2017 photo has a precise time attribution:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/comparison-president-trump-and-barack-obamas-inauguration-crowds/

To quote the text at bottom: “Image Taken At 11:49 a.m. ET From Live Pool Camera.”

That’s 11 minutes before the ceremony began. Unless PBS engaged in forgery — and I fully expect we’ll be hearing that theory soon, too — the White House crowd claims were flatly incorrect. Photos taken not from the Monument end of the Mall but from the stage end, like CNN’s, naturally show a big crowd. It was a big crowd! But not as big as Obama’s in 2009.

Further, “[a]ll of this space was full when the president took the Oath of Office” when photographs demonstrated otherwise. If you’re going to excoriate the press for alleged inaccuracies, you’d darn well better have the facts straight yourself,” holds true for critics as well.
Note, there is no time-stamp on the Trump photo in the side-by-side. It could have been taken while attendees had only begun arriving…. Which seems likely the truth when you take a peek at the CNN gigapixel photo, here: http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/

Pan it around and you can easily see the crowd in attendance at the time Trump gave his inaugural speech (hint: you can be confident of the timeframe, as he’s standing at the podium when the photo was taken.)

If Trump allows the media to publish such untruthful and misleading trash, no matter how picayune it may appear to us, then he allows the media to set the tone for his administration, and loses control over the [truthful] publicizing his presidential actions. He will have lost before ever leaving the starting gate.

It, of course, didn’t help that Spicer cited incorrect numbers about Metro ridership and claimed “All of this space was full when the president took the Oath of Office” when photographs demonstrated otherwise. If you’re going to excoriate the press for alleged inaccuracies, you’d darn well better have the facts straight yourself.

And beyond that, it cuts to a refusal to acknowledge numbers at all, lest they be used to draw any conclusions about the world. At a subsequent briefing, Spicer refused to give the unemployment rate (or simply acknowledge he didn’t know it off the top of his head; nobody expects him to know every figure). While one might expect such behavior from an Administration seeking to obscure bad news, such obfuscation was necessary here because the unemployment rate is too low for the President’s political purposes. Spicer didn’t just point out the flaws in using the single U-3 rate for everything, which would have been quite appropriate––it’s a single measure that measures one thing only; he went on to question the value of numbers at all, saying the President would focus more on anecdotes, “whether or not the American people are doing better as a whole.” That’s frightening if you care at all about using data to inform decision-making or evaluate the success of policies.