Tag: press

Trump on ‘New York Times’: ‘The Intent is So Evil and So Bad’

Leave a comment

President Trump got specific in his latest discussion about the “fake news media,” singling out The New York Times for scorn, while heaping praise on Breitbart News and an individual Reuters reporter.

As in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the president explained that he is not calling all media the “enemy of the American people” during an Oval Office interview with Breitbart Monday. Rather, it is only the “fake media” that he considers the “opposition party.”

“There’s a difference,” Trump said. “The fake media is the enemy of the American people. There’s tremendous fake media out there. Tremendous fake stories. The problem is the people that aren’t involved in the story don’t know that.”

“I didn’t say the media is the enemy — I said the ‘fake media,'” the president explained. “They take the word fake out and all of a sudden it’s like I’m against — there are some great reporters like you. I know some great honorable reporters who do a great job like Steve [Holland] from Reuters, others, many others. I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the ‘fake media,’ where they make up everything there is to make up.”

Trump has included some of the country’s most widely-consumed and well-respected news organizations in his definition of “fake media.” All three major television networks (NBC, ABC and CBS), CNN, MSNBC and The Washington Post are among the outlets Trump has slapped the label on.

But no news media organization has drawn the president’s ire like the Times.

“If you read The New York Times, it’s — the intent is so evil and so bad,” Trump told Breitbart. “The stories are wrong in many cases, but it’s the overall intent.”

Trump cited a May 2016 story titled “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved Badly With Women in Private,” as an example of what he considers bad reporting by the newspaper. One of the women interviewed in the story, Rowanne Brewer Lane, went on cable news after the piece ran to criticize the Times‘ story, saying her words were taken out of context.

“They did a front page article on women talking about me, and the women went absolutely wild because they said that was not what they said,” Trump said. “It was a big front-page article, and the Times wouldn’t even apologize and yet they were wrong. You probably saw the women. They went on television shows and everything.”

The Times stood by the story.

Annonymous sources have been a particular source of consternation for Trump. FactCheck.org points out that the use of unnamed sources has been the subject of ongoing debate within the media. But despite Trump’s tirades against the practice, he has often used anonymous sources himself, according to FactCheck.org.

Citing “oligopolies in the media,” the Breitbart interviewer suggested that Trump might consider blocking the pending merger of AT&T with Time Warner because Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.

“I don’t want to comment on any specific deal, but I do believe there has to be competition in the marketplace and maybe even more so with the media because it would be awfully bad after years if we ended up having one voice out there,” Trump replied.

(h/t USA Today)

White House Planted Fake Story to Smear Politico Reporter Who Wrote About Leaks

Leave a comment

The White House apparently attempted to smear a critical reporter by planting a story about him laughing at the mention of a Navy SEAL’s death.

Politico published a story Sunday morning by Alex Isenstadt and Annie Karni on a surprise meeting called by White House press secretary Sean Spicer to examine aides’ phones and other electronic devices for evidence of leaks.

When multiple sources leaked details of that meeting to Isenstadt and Karni, it appears other White House officials slapped back at one of the Politico reporters using the death of a Navy SEAL killed just days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in a controversial Yemen raid.

The Washington Examiner published a story Sunday evening, about six and a half hours after the “phone check” report broke, that claims one of the Politico reporters mocked a Trump aide’s emotional reaction to the death of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens.

Politico’s editor, Carrie Budoff Brown, accused the White House of anonymously planting a false story to smear one of the website’s reporters.

Trump complained last week that anonymous sources should be banned as sources of “fake news.”

Isenstadt and Karni reported that Spicer had caused deputy communications director Jessica Ditt to cry after criticizing her work at a staff meeting — but the press secretary offered a denial to Politico.

“The only time Jessica recalls almost getting emotional is when we had to relay the information on the death of Chief Ryan Owens,” Spicer said.

Hours after that story broke, “one informed official” told the Examiner‘s Paul Bedard that Isenstadt “appeared dismissive and laughed” at Spicer’s denial.

“He started laughing about that SEAL,” the “informed official” told the Examiner.

That anonymous White House source also complained that Politico had described Ditt as a “more junior spokesperson,” which the official found “insulting.”

Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring flatly denied that Isenstadt had laughed at the reference to Owens’ death, and the Examiner’s Bedard defended his use of the anonymous source for his report.

“I thought Brad had a good response as did the anon Politico who characterized Spicer,” he told Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple.

(h/t Raw Story)

Trump Will Be First POTUS to Skip White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Over 30 Years

Leave a comment

President Donald Trump is skipping this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, he announced Saturday on Twitter, offering without any explanation: “Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!”

Slated to take place April 29, the annual dinner is traditionally attended by the president, first lady, members of the administration, the White House press corps and numerous media outlets. Proceeds raised by the dinner go toward scholarships and awards for aspiring journalists.

The gathering is typically hosted by a noted comedian who roasts the president and members of the media, and then lets the commander in chief crack his own jokes.

A number of publications — including Bloomberg, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair — have joined a growing list of news organizations that refused to host parties around the ceremonies, citing the president’s baseless claims that longstanding media organizations are spreading “fake news” or are “the enemy of the American people.”

The announcement comes after the president and his administration continue to maintain a public feud with the press and blocked multiple media organizations from attending an impromptu daily briefing with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Friday.

CNN, The New York Times and Politico were not able to attend the off-camera press gaggle with Spicer, while conservative media organizations were shown preference by the administration.

The White House Correspondents’ Association responded shortly after Trump tweeted and said they still planned to have the dinner despite his absence.

“The WHCA takes note of President Donald Trump’s announcement on Twitter that he does not plan to attend the dinner, which has been and will continue to be a celebration of the First Amendment and the important role played by an independent news media in a healthy republic,” association President Jeff Mason said in a statement.

“We look forward to shining a spotlight at the dinner on some of the best political journalism of the past year and recognizing the promising students who represent the next generation of our profession,” he added.

White House Strategist Steve Bannon told Conservative Political Action Conference attendees on Thursday that Trump would continue to attack the media, which Bannon described as “corporatist,” “globalist” and members of “the opposition party.”

Late-night comedy host Samantha Bee announced that she would host a dinner at the same night and time to compete with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in protest of the Trump administration. Named “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” all proceeds raised will be donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Trump attended the dinner in 2011 when Barack Obama was president and was roasted by the then-president.

The first White House Correspondents’ Dinner occurred in 1921, and the first president attended — Calvin Coolidge — in 1924. Fifteen presidents have attended since.

Ronald Reagan was the last president to skip the dinner, according to the Reagan Library. In 1981, the newly elected president decided he wouldn’t attend because he was recovering from a gunshot wound in a failed assassination attempt on his life less than a month earlier.

Nevertheless, Reagan still called in to provide a few remarks.

“If I could give you just one little bit of advice,” Reagan quipped over the phone, “when somebody tells you to get in a car quick, do it.”

(h/t NBC News)

 

 

 

White House Blocks Major News Organizations From Press Briefing

Leave a comment

CNN and other news organizations were blocked Friday from a White House press briefing.

There was no immediate explanation from the White House.

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Politico were also excluded from the meeting, which is known as a gaggle and is less formal than the televised Q-and-A session in the White House briefing room.

The Associated Press and Time magazine boycotted the briefing because of how it was handled. The White House Correspondents Association is protesting.

The conservative media organizations Breitbart News, The Washington Times and One America News Network were allowed in.

Hours earlier, at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, President Trump mocked and disparaged the news media. He said that much of the press represents “the enemy of the people.”

“They are the enemy of the people because they have no sources,” Trump said. “They just make them up when there are none.”

He also said reporters “shouldn’t be allowed” to use unnamed sources.

(h/t CNN)

Trump Again Calls Media ‘Enemy of the People’

Leave a comment

President Trump turned his speech before a conservative convention into a full-throated attack on journalism Friday, saying some reporters make up unnamed sources for “fake news” and again describing them as “the enemy” of the American people.

“A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are — they are the enemy of the people,” Trump told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

While praising some reporters as honest, and pledging fealty to the First Amendment, Trump claimed that “the fake news media doesn’t tell the truth.” He said reporters should not be allowed to use anonymous sources, and “we’re going to do something about it.”

The president did not elaborate on what that “something” might be, beyond general criticism.

It was the latest in a series of attacks that, critics said, are designed to undermine coverage of Trump’s troubles in office, including investigations into possible links between his campaign associates and Russians during last year’s presidential election.

The sustained attacks show “how worried he is about the repeated reports of chaos, incompetence, and potential wrongdoing inside his administration,” said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. “His problem, though, is with the facts, not the media, and he’s only making his problem worse the more he runs away from it.”

In his speech to the annual gathering of conservative activists known as CPAC, Trump also thanked them for their support and touted an agenda that includes tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, a military build-up, a still-to-be-defined replacement for Obama’s health care law, and “border security” that includes travel restrictions from Muslim countries and a proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Our victory was a win for everyone who believes it’s time to stand up for America, to stand up for the American worker and to stand up for the American flag,” Trump said.

The crowd also lapped up his attacks on the media, which came on the same day that he and aides disputed a CNN story that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus spoke to the FBI about media reports on the investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.

In assailing anonymous sources and so-called “fake news,” Trump discussed specific stories and news organizations in general terms, at one point describing CNN as the “Clinton News Network.”

The White House also deploys anonymity from time to time. Less than two hours before Trump criticized the use of anonymous sources and said all sources should be named, an administration official provided a briefing on condition he not be identified.

Some analysts said Trump’s constant attacks on the press are designed to undermine the public’s faith in institutions in general and the media in particular, as well as to generate doubt about negative stories regarding the administration.

Liz Mair, a Republican consultant involved in a “Never Trump” campaign last year, said attacking the media at a forum like the Conservative Political Action Conference is the easiest way for Trump to unite conservatives who might otherwise oppose him over issues like entitlement spending, free trade, and limited government.

“CPAC has been trying to normalize Trump as a ‘conservative’ for years now, but the fact is, Trump continues to have precious little in common, philosophically, with Burke, Kirk, Reagan, Goldwater or Thatcher,” Mair said.

William McRaven, the retired admiral who planned the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, said this week that Trump’s attacks on the media may also be undermining democracy itself.

“The president said the news media is the enemy of the American people,” McRaven, now chancellor of the University of Texas system, said in a speech. “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

Trump first made the “enemy” claim in a tweet a week ago, and he criticized coverage of that incident during his remarks Friday at CPAC.

“In covering my comments, the dishonest media did not explain that I called the ‘fake news’ the enemy of the people,” he said. “The ‘fake news.’ They dropped off the word ‘fake.’ And all of a sudden the story became the media is the enemy.”

In that Feb. 17 tweet, Trump said: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

Trump said he is not “against the media,” and “there are some great reporters around,” but there are also “terrible, dishonest people” in the business.

“I love the First Amendment — nobody loves it better than me,” Trump said at one point. “Nobody — I mean, who use its more than I do?”

(h/t USA Today)

Media

Trump Attends Private Mar-a-Lago Event Without Telling Press Corps

Leave a comment

President Trump attended a private fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday evening, without informing the press corps that follows him and reports on his movements.

Trump made an unexpected stop at a fundraiser for Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute held at his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., the Washington Post reported.

The event was not on his schedule.

A video posted on Instagram shows Trump arriving at the private fundraiser, where he was met with cheers. More than 800 people attended the event, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Sunday.

Trump has visited Mar-a-Lago for three straight weekends. Last weekend, Trump and Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe scrambled to respond to a North Korean missile test while guests in the public dining room looked on.

Memberships for Trump’s resort have doubled to $200,000 a year since Trump won the election.

Students at Harvard Medical School demanded the Saturday fundraiser be held elsewhere last month. The students’ demands came right after Trump issued a controversial executive order on immigration and refugees, which the students argued threatened practicing doctors.

The cancer institute ended up holding the event since “contracts have been signed, and a large number of people have committed to attend,” the institute said in a statement.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump son-in-law tells Time Warner of CNN concerns

Leave a comment

President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, recently met with CNN’s parent company Time Warner and mentioned the cable news network’s coverage of the administration as slanted.

During the meeting at the White House, Kushner expressed concerns about what the administration considers is CNN’s unfair coverage of the President to Gary Ginsberg, Time Warner’s executive vice president of corporate marketing and communications, two persons familiar with the situation said. One of the persons said that topics of the discussion included Israel and Kushner made a joking reference to CNN’s perceived anti-Trump coverage.

Trump disparaged CNN during his press conference Thursday while taking a question from CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta noting “the hatred coming from other people on your network.”

The president has made clear his disdain for CNN. A month ago, during Trump’s first full press conference after being elected, he called CNN a peddler of “fake news” because the network had produced a story reporting that the U.S. intelligence officials had presented Trump and President Obama with a “dossier” of unverified, but potentially compromising information about the president-elect that Russian operatives claimed to have.

What makes the CNN-Time Warner situation so sticky is AT&T’s pending $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. During the campaign, Trump criticized the merger because the resulting company would have too much market power. “AT&T is buying Time Warner, and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration,” he said in October.

However, post-election meetings with administration officials left AT&T executives with confidence about passage, The Financial Times reported in December, citing persons familiar with the situation.

Trump and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson did not discuss the merger when they met last month, the company said. But Stephenson last week told CNBC he expects the deal to pass Justice Department scrutiny and close by the end of the year. And the subject of the merger reportedly did not arise during Kushner’s recent meeting with Time Warner, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the meeting.
AT&T, Time Warner and CNN declined comment on the meeting.
But two CNN analysts — Republican strategist and commentator Ana Navarro and Van Jones, a former adviser to President Obama — responded to the report on Twitter. Navarro noted that Kushner “who’s supposed to achieve Middle East peace, is complaining about me to CNN,” in a tweet.
Jones used some lyrics from Drake’s song Energy — “Got a lotta people tryna drain me of this energy.” — then added, “But y’all know @CNN has our backs. Do you? RT if yes! (@jaredkushner, u can RT, 2!).”
Both sides in this situation should tread carefully, says John Coffee, a law professor and and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. “Time Warner is extremely vulnerable to pressure in this context — although the slightest application of pressure would backfire explosively,” he said. “Trump really cannot afford another fiasco right now when his administration keeps stumbling over itself. Thus, we may be witnessing another self-inflicted wound that is about to occur.”

(h/t USA Today)

 

Trump Tweets: The Media is the ‘Enemy of the American People’

Leave a comment

President Trump blasted the media as “the enemy of the American people” in a tweet Friday, calling out several outlets specifically.

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he wrote.

He had posted and then quickly deleted a slightly different version of the tweet just a few minutes earlier, which omitted ABC and CBS. He also included the word “SICK!” at the end of the original post.

The tweet came one day after Trump held an adversarial and lengthy news conference, in which he berated the media as “very fake news” and dismissed news reports about his and his associates’ ties to Russia as a “ruse.”

About an hour later, he posted a second tweet criticizing the media’s coverage of the press conference.

“‘One of the most effective press conferences I’ve ever seen!’ says Rush Limbaugh. Many agree.Yet FAKE MEDIA calls it differently! Dishonest,” Trump wrote.

Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press, and often labels news stories he sees as unfavorable as “fake news.” Trump’s campaign issued a survey to supporters on Friday, asking them to gauge the trustworthiness of the media.

The news outlets singled out in Trump’s Friday afternoon tweet are not new targets for the president. He has often lambasted CNN and The New York Times, referring to them as “failing” and out of touch with voters.

In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Trump echoed Bannon’s comments shortly after, telling “The Brody File” that “the media is the opposition party in many ways.”

(h/t The Hill)

 

 

 

White House Reporter Accuses Trump Aide Omarosa Manigault of Bullying Her

Leave a comment

A longtime White House reporter says that President Trump’s aide Omarosa Manigault “physically intimidated” her when they got into an argument in the West Wing last week, according to The Washington Post.

The reporter, April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks, said that the former star of “The Apprentice” intimidated her in a way that could have invited involvement by the Secret Service.

“She stood right in my face like she was going to hit me,” Ryan told the Post. “I said, ‘You better back up.’ . . . She thought I would be bullied. I won’t be.”

She added that Manigault made verbal threats and claimed that she was one of several black journalists that the White House has “dossiers” on, the Post reports.

The report said there were others who witnessed their argument, which the report said was tied to emails that Manigault sent Ryan during the election race last year. In one email, she sent a link to a story that listed names of journalists that Hillary Clinton’s campaign supposedly wanted to influence, which included Ryan.

“This story suggests that as a reporter, you are (or were) a paid Clinton surrogate,” Manigault wrote in the email, according to the Post. “I pray this is not true! This could be hurtful to your legacy and the integrity of your work.”

Minutes later, Manigault reportedly sent a second email: “Protect your legacy!! You have worked too hard to have people question your ethics as a journalist. People talking trash about the reporters on that list having NO integrity. It’s hurtful to hear people say those things about you.”

The report said that the two women used to be friends and Manigault even asked Ryan to be a bridesmaid in her upcoming wedding, but Ryan has declined that offer.

(h/t CBS News)

White House Grants Press Credentials to a Pro-Trump Blog

Leave a comment

The Gateway Pundit, a provocative conservative blog, gained notice last year for its fervent pro-Trump coverage and its penchant for promoting false rumors about voter fraud and Hillary Clinton’s health that rocketed around right-wing websites.

Now the site will report on politics from a prominent perch: the White House.

The Trump administration has granted press credentials to Lucian B. Wintrich, the Washington correspondent for Gateway Pundit, to attend White House press briefings and ask questions of the press secretary, Sean M. Spicer.

Mr. Wintrich, an artist and writer who has collaborated with Milo Yiannopoulos, the polarizing editor at Breitbart News, attended President Trump’s news conference with the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on Monday. He was joined by the owner of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, who posted on Twitter, “President Trump just spoke about tossing criminal migrants and I wanted to stand up and cheer!!”

In a telephone interview from the West Wing, Mr. Wintrich, 28, said he would “be reporting far more fairly than a lot of the very left-wing outlets that are currently occupying the briefing room.” He added, “We will be doing a little trolling of the media in general here.”

Asked what kind of trolling his fellow White House correspondents might want to prepare for, Mr. Wintrich paused. “I don’t want to give too much away,” he said. “We have some pretty solid stuff planned.”

Bloggers and pundits have been granted access to White House briefings in previous administrations, and Mr. Spicer in recent weeks has taken questions from conservative talk-radio hosts and reporters at local broadcast affiliates. But the inclusion of Gateway Pundit has raised concerns that the Trump administration, which has called the news media “the opposition party,’’ is favoring outlets more sympathetic to its views.

On Monday, some journalists complained after Mr. Trump took questions at his news conference only from a local broadcast journalist and a reporter from The Daily Caller, a conservative news site. Neither reporter asked about one of the day’s top stories, the status of Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

Several inquiries to the White House were not returned on Monday.

Gateway Pundit has been cited by the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, The Drudge Report, Sarah Palin and other popular conservative personalities and outlets. Last month, the site drew criticism for disseminating a false report that a Washington Post journalist had photographed the written notes of Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson during a confirmation hearing. The journalist, who did not attend the hearing, was subsequently harassed with threatening voice mail messages and online attacks.

When asked about the false stories, Mr. Wintrich said: “That is the state of new media. When you are trying to get new information out there as quickly as possible, occasionally you’ll get something wrong and have to fix it. That’s how media works right now.” He said that Gateway Pundit had “broken dozens and dozens more factual stories” but did not offer an example when asked for one.

Mr. Wintrich described himself as a Trump supporter and Goldwater conservative who enjoys “simultaneously trolling both progressives and evangelical conservatives.” He said his aim was “to provide fair coverage from the conservative side.”

On Twitter on Monday, Mr. Wintrich posted a photograph of himself standing behind the White House press room lectern, a White House pass slung around his neck. The post from Mr. Hoft included the hashtag #pepe and an accompanying Pepe emoji, a reference to Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been repurposed as a symbol by white supremacy and anti-Semitic groups.

Mr. Wintrich said the inclusion of the Pepe icon was not meant as anti-Semitic. “My grandfather is Jewish, he fought against the Germans, escaped through the Polish underground,” Mr. Wintrich said.

(h/t New York Times)

1 … 34 35 36 37 38 … 43