President Donald Trump slammed what he terms the "fake media" in an Oval Office interview Monday with Breitbart News, singling out The New York Times for targeting him with "evil" intent.
"If you read The New York Times . . . the intent is so evil and so bad," Trump told Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle. "The stories are wrong in many cases, but it’s the overall intent. Look at that paper over the last two years. In fact, they had to write a letter of essentially apology to their subscribers because they got the election so wrong."
Trump reiterated to Breitbart that his problem is not with the media as a whole, but "the fake media."
"There's a difference," Trump said. "The fake media is the opposition party. 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."
What's worse, Trump said, is that when he publicly criticizes the "fake media" the very members of the media he is talking about remove "fake" from his quote and make it sound like he is criticizing the entire media.
That makes it sound like he is targeting the entire press, he said, pointing out that there are plenty of "great, honorable reporters," including Boyle himself, Steve Holland at Reuters and "many others."
Trump said The New York Times often gets stories wrong, and "had to write a letter of essentially apology to their subscribers because they got the election so wrong."
He also pointed to a Times story that quoted women saying he had behaved inappropriately with them.
Despite some of the women interviewed saying the newspaper misrepresented what they said, the Times never retracted the story, Trump said.
"I call them the failing New York Times, and they write lies," Trump told Breitbart. "The reporter who wrote the story has a website full of hatred of Donald Trump. So, he shouldn’t be allowed to be a reporter because he’s not objective."
Trump often pointed out members of the press at his campaign rallies and called them dishonest. And he recently has been critical of CNN over its coverage of a leaked opposition research memo purporting to show embarrassing personal information and connections to the Russian government. CNN did not report the salacious details of the report, which have been disputed by the White House and by other members of the press. But CNN's reporting did lead BuzzFeed to release the entire report.
And last week, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer came under fire after holding a press gaggle in his office that excluded CNN, The New York Times, Politico, BuzzFeed, and most of the foreign press.
Spicer said the purpose was not to ban anybody, but that it was the type of briefing normally covered only by the press pool, which was slightly expanded.
Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was CEO of Breitbart News before becoming Trump's campaign manager in 2016, said at last week's CPAC meeting that the administration will likely have a daily fight with the liberal press which doesn't want Trump to keep his campaign promises.
"President Trump is following through on what he promised the American people, and the mainstream media better understand something — all of those promises are going to be implemented," Bannon said.
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