The Trump Administration continued its war on the media yesterday, both rhetorically and in deeds and action:
WASHINGTON — President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and berating members of his own F.B.I. as “leakers” who he said were putting the nation at risk.
In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump criticized as “fake news” organizations that publish anonymously sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. And in a series of Twitter posts, he assailed the F.B.I. as a dangerously porous agency, condemning unauthorized revelations of classified information from within its ranks and calling for an immediate hunt for leakers.
Hours after the speech, as if to demonstrate Mr. Trump’s determination to punish reporters whose coverage he dislikes, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, barred journalists from The New York Times and several other news organizations from attending his daily briefing, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps.
Mr. Trump’s barrage against the news media continued well into Friday night. “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after 10 p.m., singling out The Times and CNN. “A great danger to our country.”
The moves underscored the degree to which Mr. Trump and members of his inner circle are eager to use the prerogatives of the presidency to undercut those who scrutinize him, dismissing negative stories as lies and confining press access at the White House to a few chosen news organizations considered friendly. The Trump White House has also vowed new efforts to punish leakers.
Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press came as the White House pushed back on a report by CNN on Thursday night that a White House official had asked the F.B.I. to rebut a New York Times article last week detailing contacts between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian intelligence officials. The report asserted that a senior White House official had called top leaders at the F.B.I. to request that they contact reporters to dispute the Times’s account.
“The fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” Mr. Trump said to the delight of the conservatives packed into the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just south of Washington. “It doesn’t represent the people, it doesn’t and never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.”
“The fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” Mr. Trump said to the delight of the conservatives packed into the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just south of Washington. “It doesn’t represent the people, it doesn’t and never will represent the people, and we’re going to do something about it.”
In the West Wing less than three hours later, the consequences were becoming clear. Mr. Spicer told a handpicked group of reporters in a briefing in his spacious office that the White House would relentlessly counter coverage it considered inaccurate.
“We’re going to aggressively push back,” he said, according to a recording of the session provided by a reporter who was allowed to attend. “We’re just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there.”
Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer admitted only reporters from a group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed.
Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fox News also attended.
Reporters from The Associated Press and Time magazine, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions. The Washington Post did not send a reporter to the session.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”
Marty Baron, the Post’s editor, called Mr. Spicer’s decision to exclude some news organizations from a scheduled briefing “appalling.”
“This is an undemocratic path that the administration is traveling,” Mr. Baron said. “There is nothing to be gained from the White House restricting the public’s access to information.”
The White House played down the drama surrounding Friday’s briefing.
“We invited the pool, so everyone was represented,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said in an email Friday afternoon, referring to the small group of reporters on hand at the White House each day to follow the president and send reports to the broader press corps. “We decided to add a couple of additional people beyond the pool. Nothing more than that.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the press corps, also protested the decision. But Jeff Mason, the organization’s president, pointed out that the White House had provided near-daily briefings and accepted questions from a variety of news outlets since Mr. Trump took office.
“We’re not happy with how things went today,” Mr. Mason said in an interview. “But it’s important to keep in mind the context of how things have gone up until now.” He added: “I don’t think that people should rush to judgment to suggest that this is the start of a big crackdown on media access.”
Still, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which typically advocates press rights in countries with despotic regimes, issued an alarmed statement on Friday about Mr. Trump’s escalating language.
“It is not the job of political leaders to determine how journalists should conduct their work, and sets a terrible example for the rest of the world,” said the group’s executive director, Joel Simon. “The U.S. should be promoting press freedom and access to information.”
Mr. Trump, in his attack on the news media at the conservative gathering, complained at length about the use of anonymous sources in news stories, charging that some reporters were fabricating unnamed sources to level unfair charges against him.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” Mr. Trump said. “Let their name be put out there.”
At another point, he said, “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up.” He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors.
Those comments came shortly after his own aides had held a briefing for the White House press pool on the condition of anonymity to deny CNN’s story suggesting there had been improper contact between the White House and the F.B.I. regarding the Times article on Russian contacts.
As noted, the White House’s action in barring CNN and other news organizations from Friday afternoon’s press gaggle while allowing in partisan news sources such as Breitbart drew widespread criticism from members of the media as well as a sharp rebuke from CNN’s Jake Tapper:
.@jaketapper: "The White House does not value an independent press. There is a word for that: Un-American." https://t.co/iq7Ka3PPFd pic.twitter.com/GQLPAzRgMw
— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) February 24, 2017
As did Shepherd Smith on Fox News Channel:
WATCH: For the third time in two months, Fox News' Shep Smith has stood up for a free press. "CNN is not fake news" pic.twitter.com/wbJmy7LMiD
— Yashar (@yashar) February 24, 2017
Beyond the commentary that yesterday’s afternoon generated, there is talk of further action if the White House continues this derisive treatment of the news media. Some news organizations have already said that they would not attend this year’s White House Correspondents Association Dinner in April, and others have gone so far as to suggest that the entire event should be canceled or that they WHCA should take the extraordinary step of declining to invite the President. Additionally, many reporters at the White House itself have spoken out against the Press Secretary’s actions, just as they did during the Obama Administration when it appears that officials were blocking Fox News from having access to certain events or certain guests for their Sunday morning news show. Ultimately, of course, the Obama Administration relented and treated Fox the same way it treated all the other media organizations. At this point, it’s unclear whether the Trump Administration will do the same thing, but the signs point toward all of this continuing and getting worse long before it gets better.
None of this should be a surprise, of course. As I’ve noted before, Trump’s war with the media began long ago. In terms of the Presidential campaign, it started virtually from the day he entered the race and continued at rallies where he would accuse the media of not covering him even as he was appearing, usually via telephone from his Trump Tower office, on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News on a daily basis and all three networks were giving almost universally wall-to-wall coverage of speeches during which he rountinely denounced the reporters who were covering him and effectively encouraged supporters in attendance to verbally attack and intimidate them to the point where many reporters were being escorted out of venues by Secret Service agents and local law enforcement for their own safety. He made fun of a disabled reporter for The New York Times who disputed his discredited claim that “thousands” of Muslim-Americans were cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. And the crowds ate it up. So, it really isn’t a surprise that it would continue now that he’s President.
There’s a huge difference, of course, between Trump’s rhetoric as a candidate and his rhetoric and actions as a candidate. In the former case, it’s easy to dismiss what he said as campaign fluff and the ranting of a guy who was appealing to a crowd already disposed to believing that the entire media system is biased against them. Now that he’s President, though, he’s turning that rhetoric into action in a way that even someone as critical of the media as Richard Nixon did not do during their time in office. Because of that it’s essential that other members of the media, and the public as a whole, speak out against what the Administration is doing. The alternative is to remain silent while a President of the United States continues to wage war on freedom of the press in a way that no other President has done before, and that’s simply unacceptable.
