Alex Weprin

Was Trump’s inauguration the most-streamed of all time?

In Sean Spicer’s first official daily press briefing Jan 23, he said that when you factor in people who streamed President Donald Trump’s inauguration online, it would make it the most-watched presidential inauguration in history. He has a point, but it is one that is almost impossible to prove. The reason? TV ratings and online streaming metrics are not an apples-to-apples comparison, so there is no easy way to calculate exactly how many people watched the inauguration online in a way that is comparable to TV viewership data released by Nielsen.

TV viewership for the inauguration was 30.6 million people, according to Nielsen, down from just under 38 million viewers in 2009. Still, those ratings were good enough to top the inaugurations of Bill Clinton and both George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. In general, video streaming has been on the rise over the past decade, while linear TV viewership (people watching TV live on their television sets) has declined, but there is not yet data that brings together TV and online video viewership. Spicer cited CNN’s 17 million streams of Trump’s inauguration, which he added to the 2.6 million that watched CNN live on TV. The problem with that is that the 2.6 million figure is not the total number of people that watched CNN, it was the average number of people that watched. The 17 million streams are the total number of streams, not the average number of people watching. That 17 million figure may include people that reloaded the webpage, or that clicked in and watched for 30 seconds, or people where the inauguration started to auto-play on the CNN story they clicked through.

Obama, Trump paint contrasting pictures of role of White House press corps

President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump described two very different visions for how the White House press corp should operate, with Trump setting the stage for significant changes to the status quo. Trump’s press team has been teasing out the possibility that White House daily briefing may be moved out of the Brady Briefing Room in the West Wing of the White House, perhaps to a space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, or the White House Conference Center. They have also raised the possibility of other changes, including taking over responsibility for which outlets and reporters get credentialed, and which reporters can sit where. Trump himself told Fox News that while the daily briefing will stay in the White House, his press team may restrict access to who can attend.

President Obama, in his final news conference as president, painted a very different picture of the role the White House press corp should play. “Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, it makes us work harder,” President Obama said, apparently in reference to the idea that the briefings should move outside of the West Wing. “America needs you, and our democracy needs you.”

C-SPAN: 'Internal routing error' caused RT interruption

C-SPAN said that an "internal routing error" was responsible for Russia Today suddenly taking over C-SPAN's online video feed. The company said that it had completed and internal investigation, and said that the mistake happened while it was testing for inauguration coverage. "C-SPAN has concluded its investigation and as we had anticipated last Thursday, the interruption of our C-SPAN.org livestream on January 12th was caused by an internal routing error," the statement reads. "C-SPAN.org was not hacked. We have determined that during testing for inaugural coverage, RT's signal was mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-SPAN1's signal to the internet, rather than to an unused backup."

Time Warner CEO: Trump isn’t serious about redefining First Amendment

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who counts CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. and TBS among the media companies in his portfolio, says that President-Elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises to redefine the First Amendment and “open up the libel laws” are not likely to happen when he takes office.

“No, I don’t think that’s a serious thing. We should all worry if anybody was going to change the First Amendment,” Bewkes said. “Remember, the Democratic party had a campaign plan to change the First Amendment, but they were doing it in the guise of campaign finance reform,” Bewkes added. “That would worry me more, because the press tends to miss that, because they tend to lean that way, therefore they supported what they were doing, and I think though they viewed it charitably as something cleaning up money in politics. I think the threat to the First Amendment came more from the Democratic side.”

WHCA says lack of media access to President-elect Trump is 'unacceptable'

The White House Correspondents' Association released a statement urging President-elect Donald Trump's transition team to immediately set up a press pool, so that reporters can follow President-elect Trump as he prepares to assume the office of the Presidency. The statement follows the news that President-elect Trump dined with friends and family at the 21 Club restaurant in Manhattan, after reporters that cover him were told that he would be staying in Trump Tower for the rest of the night. President-elect Trump's transition team has said that a formal pool plan is in the works but not yet ready.

"On Tuesday President-elect Trump went out for dinner in New York without a pool of journalists in his motorcade and after reporters were advised that he was in for the night. One week after the election, it is unacceptable for the next president of the United States to travel without a regular pool to record his movements and inform the public about his whereabouts," said WHCA president and Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason. "The White House Correspondents' Association is pleased to hear reassurances by the Trump transition team that it will respect long-held traditions of press access at the White House and support a pool structure. But the time to act on that promise is now. Pool reporters are in place in New York to cover the president-elect as he assembles his new administration. It is critical that they be allowed to do their jobs."