Alternative facts
Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers at Donald Trump's first inauguration as President of the United States.
Within four days of the interview, sales of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased 95-fold, which The New York Times and others attributed to Conway's use of the phrase, making it the number-one bestseller on Amazon.com.
[3] On January 21, 2017, while White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held his first press briefing, he accused the media of deliberately underestimating the size of the crowd for President Trump's first inaugural ceremony the day before and stated that the ceremony had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe".
[4] Trump's campaign strategist and counselor, Kellyanne Conway, defended Spicer's statements in a Meet the Press interview.
"[1] In her answer, Conway argued that crowd numbers in general could not be assessed with certainty and objected to what she described as Todd's trying to make her look ridiculous.
He stood by his widely disputed claim that the inauguration was the most-viewed, stating he also included online viewership in addition to in-person and television in his figures.
[18] Two days after the Todd interview she defended Trump's travel restrictions by talking about a nonexistent "Bowling Green massacre" (she later said she was referring to the arrest of two Iraqis in Bowling Green, Kentucky, for sending aid to insurgents in Iraq), and by falsely claiming that President Obama in 2011 had "banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months".
"[26] Spicer's press conference and Conway's follow-up comments drew quick reactions on social media.
When you have a spokesperson for the president of the United States wrap up a lie in the Orwellian phrase "alternative facts". ...
When you have a press secretary in his first appearance before the White House reporters threaten, bully, lie, and then walk out of the briefing room without the cojones to answer a single question ... Facts and the truth are not partisan.
Everyone must answer that question.The New York Times responded with a fact check of statements made during Spicer's press conference.
[36][37][38] Following Conway's Meet the Press interview and the viral response on social media in which "alternative facts" was likened to Doublethink and Newspeak, terms from George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, sales of the book increased by more than 9,500 percent, rising to the number one best-selling book on Amazon.com.
[39][40][41] Snopes journalist Alex Kasprak noted that a passage from Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark became a viral meme about alternative facts after the inauguration of Trump; Kasprak commented "the proffered description of that nightmare was authentic".
"[43][44] In a Breitbart News article dated January 23, 2017, editor Joel Pollak defended Conway's use of "alternative facts" by arguing that it was a "harmless, and accurate term in a legal setting, where each side of a dispute will lay out its own version of the facts for the court to decide".
Their complaint applies against Conway, a lawyer in public office, on the grounds that under rule 8.4(c): "It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation", because of Conway's pattern of misrepresentation as well as her misuse of words such as "massacre" at a time when she holds high public office.
[46] The term alternative facts became a mainstay in popular culture, from late night comedians to serious news outlets.
