Speed Reads

the royal wedding

The BBC teased Trump about the royal wedding's crowd size: 'just saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯'

President Trump spent much of his first week in office making the demonstrably false claim that the crowd at his inauguration was the "biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches" — and the BBC has not forgotten. BBC Three, which offers programming aimed at young adult audiences, seized the occasion of the royal wedding on Saturday to send out a snarky tweet:

All joking aside, though the London crowd may look larger in the photos included in the tweet, Reuters UK has estimated only 100,000 people turned out to watch the wedding in person. If that figure is correct, the wedding crowd is substantially smaller than Trump's inaugural audience, which federal agency estimates put at about 800,000.

In television viewership, however, the wedding has the inauguration beat: Early reports say the nuptials were watched by up to 2 billion people worldwide; domestic TV viewership of Trump's inauguration was 31 million.