{"id":9648,"date":"2017-12-01T14:17:53","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T19:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/?p=9648"},"modified":"2017-12-01T14:22:38","modified_gmt":"2017-12-01T19:22:38","slug":"tree-ceremony-has-low-turnout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/tree-ceremony-has-low-turnout\/","title":{"rendered":"Tree ceremony not well attended"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By VERONICA SPAGNA<\/p>\n<p>Thursday, as part of the annual tradition which has been dated back almost 100 years, Donald Trump led the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony.<\/p>\n<p>During his campaign in 2016, President Trump said that he was looking forward to saying in the National Christmas lighting &#8220;Merry Christmas&#8221; and made the promise that Americans will be able to say Merry Christmas again instead of &#8220;Happy Holidays.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In fact during the ceremony President Trump said: \u201cToday is a day that I&#8217;ve been looking very much forward to all year long, It\u2019s one that we&#8217;ve heard and we speak about and we dream about and now, as the president of the United States, it\u2019s my tremendous honor to now wish America and the world a very Merry Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A photo shared by Steve Rudin, a journalist in Washington, went viral and showed the many empty seats during the event. The photo was shared on Twitter, Rudin tweeted with the photo that it was a &#8220;beautiful&#8221; ceremony but &#8220;hard not to notice the empty seats.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">The National Tree Lighting ceremony was beautiful this evening &#8211; but hard not to notice the empty seats. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/Christmas?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#Christmas<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/DMV?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#DMV<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/USA?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#USA<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/oKMrnnBekG\">pic.twitter.com\/oKMrnnBekG<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Steve Rudin 7News (@SteveRudin7News) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SteveRudin7News\/status\/936369495853228032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 30, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Many reporters decided to compare this National Christmas Lighting Ceremony led by President Trump with the ones led by Obama in 2009 and 2013. Reporters added photos in their articles comparing the number of people who showed up in the ceremony with different presidents. The photos showed a packed crowd of people showing up for the traditional ceremony during the Obama era, with the clear intention of highlighting the greater amount of respect and support for the last president.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By VERONICA SPAGNA Thursday, as part of the annual tradition which has been dated back almost 100 years, Donald Trump led the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony. During his campaign in 2016, President Trump said that he was looking forward &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/tree-ceremony-has-low-turnout\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[579],"tags":[99,139,26,25],"class_list":["post-9648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veronica-spagna","tag-political-reporting","tag-politics","tag-reporting","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9648"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9657,"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9648\/revisions\/9657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.com.miami.edu\/reporting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}