Sean Spicer said photos showing a larger crowd at Obama’s 2009 inauguration were presented in such a way as to downplay the size of the crowd at Trump’s. | AP Photo Former press secretaries slam Sean Spicer

Sean Spicer’s Saturday performance — in which the White House press secretary lambasted the media for their inauguration coverage and delivered a number of outright falsehoods on crowd size — elicited puzzlement from some former press secretaries and scorn from others.

“This is called a statement you're told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching,” George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer wrote on Twitter.


Jay Carney, who was former President Barack Obama’s press secretary from 2011 to 2014, fired back: “Wrong. The President I worked for never told me to lie. Ever. And I doubt Pres. Bush ever told @AriFleischer to lie. Today was not normal.”

Fleischer later wrote that Spicer’s statements did leave him “uncomfortable and concerned,” but suggested that the outrage was disproportionate to the media’s reaction to initially misleading reports about the cause of the attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012.

Brian Fallon, who was Hillary Clinton’s press secretary on the campaign trail and was widely expected to get the White House post if she won, had his own take.

“Sean Spicer lacks the guts or integrity to refuse orders to go out and lie. He is a failure in this job on his first full day,” Fallon wrote on Twitter.

Spicer strode to the White House briefing room podium Saturday evening and accused the press of “deliberately false reporting.”

In pushback on reporting about the size of inauguration crowds, he made a series of inaccurate statements about Metro ridership numbers, security measures and even the use of grass coverings on the National Mall.

He said photos showing a larger crowd at Obama’s 2009 inauguration were presented in such a way as to downplay the size of the crowd at Trump’s. He declared that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” but offered no evidence to back up the claim. Considerable evidence indicates that in-person and televised viewing were far higher in 2009.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning that Spicer was offering “alternative facts.”

“Alternative facts are not facts,” Todd responded. “They’re falsehoods.”