Trump has taken his media war global – and the Beeb is making it too easy for him

On Donald Trump's first full day in office of his first term he went to the CIA headquarters at Langley.

- JON SOPEL

It was a Saturday. I had gone down to the White House in the late afternoon to do a live report from there. And I noticed that outside the James S Brady Press Briefing Room, there was a flipchart with a handwritten note saying “press briefing this evening”. You don't get news conferences on a Saturday night, so I hung around until it started.

Eventually, in comes the press secretary, Sean Spicer, to make a statement. He read from notes written by Trump himself that we had misreported his inauguration. The crowds for the 45th president were the biggest in history, and no other president had come close.

Writing the first sentence of my news report would be easy. It was “President Trump claimed the crowds attending his inauguration were the biggest in history”. The second sentence caused a bit more head-scratching with our editors. I felt it incumbent upon us to say: “But that’s not true.” Not he says/she says, and only time will tell. But to call it straight. The photos taken from the Washington Monument towards the Capitol demonstrate that, without a shadow of a doubt, the crowds were significantly larger for Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. And because we had verified and double checked, I was clear to say that.