Category: Attack the Press

Trump: Vanity Fair is ‘dead’

President-elect Donald Trump took aim at a new media target Thursday morning, writing on Twitter that Vanity Fair magazine is “dead” and its editor has “no talent.”

The magazine has been regularly critical of Trump throughout his candidacy and into his transition, publishing stories this week headlined “someone has finally agreed to perform at Donald Trump inauguration” and “Trump Grill could be the worst restaurant in America.”

Trump shot back at the magazine Thursday morning, asking his followers, “has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”

Carter, the long-serving editor of Vanity Fair, is credited with originating a popular joke about the size of Trump’s hands. The Manhattan billionaire was regularly referred to as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the pages of now-defunct Spy magazine, which was co-founded by Carter. Sen. Marco Rubio cracked a joke about Trump’s hands during the Republican presidential primary, prompting Trump to hold up his hands at a GOP debate and say “Look at these hands. Are these small hands? And he referred to my hands if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”

Vanity Fair is the latest addition to a long list of media outlets attacked by Trump, including POLITICO, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post and NBC News.

(h/t Politico)

Trump: ‘I Would Have Far Less Reason to Tweet’ If the Media Covered Me ‘Honorably’

Twitter

President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Monday that he’d have “far less” of a reason to use Twitter if he received what he believed to be more fair coverage.

“If the press would cover me accurately & honorably, I would have far less reason to ‘tweet,'” Trump tweeted. “Sadly, I don’t know if that will ever happen!”

Trump used the social-media platform to bash NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” as “unwatchable” and “totally biased” for a skit in which Alec Baldwin impersonated the Manhattan billionaire and his tweeting habits.

“The Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad!” Trump tweeted.

He also used Twitter recently to defend himself for what he described as a congratulatory from the president of Taiwan. The call, which broke decades of US foreign-policy orthodoxy, was the first communication between the leaders of the two countries since 1979 and risked angering the Chinese government.

As is typically the case when Trump criticizes the media, he did not point out anything that was inaccurately reported but merely sowed doubt about whether the media was being forthcoming regarding its coverage of him.

(h/t Business Insider)

Reality

If only the press would stop reporting on the lies he makes…

Trump ‘Thank-You Tour’ Revives His Campaign Rallies’ Scariest Hits

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday appeared as if he never ended his campaign, attacking “the extremely dishonest media,” boasting about his “landslide” victory, and dashing speculation he might pivot and start acting like a president.

At a rally in Ohio billed as the beginning of a “thank-you tour,” Trump repeatedly pledged to unite the country and “find common ground.” But his rhetoric, almost word for word, matched the raucous and incendiary rallies of his campaign.

The crowd chanted “lock her up” at the first mention of Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, even though Trump since the election has backtracked on his pledge to prosecute Clinton for her use of a private email server. He galvanized supporters during the campaign by calling her “Crooked Hillary” and alleging she broke the law, even though the FBI cleared her.

“I’m going to discuss our action plan to make America great again,” Trump said on Thursday. “Although we did have a lot of fun fighting Hillary, right?”

The rally followed an earlier event at a Carrier Corp. factory in Indiana, where Trump boasted about his deal with the company to keep 800 jobs from moving to Mexico in exchange for tax incentives.

The two events were Trump’s first public appearances since winning the election last month.

Trump showed at the rally that he prefers campaigning to governing. Since the election, he has reportedly turned away classified intelligence briefings and has resumed tweeting conspiracy theories and late-night ramblings. He has also said he wants to continue holding rallies as president.

Trump on Thursday trotted out a few lies ― as was his style at campaign events. He falsely suggested terrorists are “pouring into our country” and described a “violent crime wave” in America’s cities.

He went on an extended riff slamming “the extremely dishonest media” and pointed at reporters covering the rally for admonishment. Trump’s transition team has restricted press access to the president-elect, setting his administration on a path of secrecy.

Trump also took a stab at a GOP primary rival, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

“Hey, in the great state of Ohio, we didn’t have the upper echelon of politician either, did we?” Trump said, a mocking reference to Kasich, who refused to support Trump and was a vocal critic.

Trump bragged that world leaders have joined in celebrating his victory in phone calls to him.

“They all tell me, they sat in their magnificent rooms in wonderment,” he said. “One of them told me, ‘I truly respect the United States again because of what happened.’”

Those calls have sparked controversy with reports that Trump discussed his businesses with foreign leaders. Trump has already been dogged by conflicts of interest between his elected office and his businesses.

Trump confirmed his appointment of retired Gen. James Mattis as defense secretary, but bizarrely claimed it was a secret until a formal announcement later, telling the crowd: “Don’t tell anyone.”

The president-elect also delivered a healthy serving of pie in the sky ― free of any facts ― just like he did during his campaign. He promised to unify the country and “overcome decades of stalemate and gridlock.”

“Now that you have put me in this position, even if you don’t help me one bit, I’m going to get it done, believe me,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It would be easier if you helped, but that’s all right. Don’t worry, I’ll get it done.”

(h/t Huffington Post)

Reality

I thought it was “time for us to come together“?

Media

Trump Tweets New Voter Fraud Claims, Blasts CNN, But Offers No Evidence

Donald Trump lashed out on Twitter Monday night and into early Tuesday morning over a CNN report refuting his unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud on Election Day.

The report by CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny, airing on “Anderson Cooper 360” earlier Monday, dismissed Trump’s assertion that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” as “blatant and baseless” and accused Trump of acting as a “sore winner.” Zeleny also highlighted that the president-elect had yet to provide any “hard evidence” to back up his “staggering claims of fraud.”

In response, Trump fired off a series of tweets aimed at CNN and Zeleny, some original and some retweets of his online supporters, including one user who apparently is a teenager.

“CNN is so embarrassed by their total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton, and yet her loss in a landslide, that they don’t know what to do,” the president-elect said.

Quoting a tweet directed at Zeleny that panned him as “just another generic CNN part time wannabe journalist,” Trump added: “CNN still doesn’t get it. They will never learn!”

In another quoted tweet, Trump cited a 16-year-old Twitter user who cast Zeleny as a “bad reporter.”

Zeleny replied: “Good evening! Have been looking for examples of voter fraud. Please send our way. Full-time journalist here still working.”

Trump continued his criticism into Tuesday morning, tweeting at 6:34 a.m.: “I thought that @CNN would get better after they failed so badly in their support of Hillary Clinton however, since election, they are worse!”

Trump’s Sunday claim of mass voter fraud in California, Virginia and New Hampshire was rebuffed by officials in all three states Monday.

“We have heard claims like this in the past, relative to our elections, but we have been provided no evidence that suggests that there is voter fraud on a widespread scale in New Hampshire,” David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s deputy secretary of state, told POLITICO in a phone interview Monday.

(h/t Politico)

Trump Holds Media Summit to Intimidate Executives

Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.

“It was like a f–ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

A second source confirmed the fireworks.

“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”

The stunned reporters tried to get a word in edgewise to discuss access to a Trump Administration.

“[CBS Good Morning co-host Gayle] King did not stand up, but asked some question, ‘How do you propose we the media work with you?’ Chuck Todd asked some pretty pointed questions. David Muir asked ‘How are you going to cope living in DC while your family is in NYC? It was a horrible meeting.”

Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway told reporters the gathering went well.

“Excellent meetings with the top executives of the major networks,” she said during a gaggle in the lobby of Trump Tower. “Pretty unprecedented meeting we put together in two days.”

The meeting was off the record, meaning the participants agreed not to talk about the substance of the conversations.

The hour-long session included top execs from network and cable news channels. Among the attendees were NBC’s Deborah Turness, Lester Holt and Chuck Todd, ABC’s James Goldston, George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and Martha Raddatz,

Also, CBS’ Norah O’Donnell John Dickerson, Charlie Rose, Christopher Isham and King, Fox News’ Bill Shine, Jack Abernethy, Jay Wallace, Suzanne Scott, MSNBC’s Phil Griffin and CNN’s Jeff Zucker and Erin Burnett.

Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, plans to meet with Trump Tuesday.

There was no immediate comment from the Trump Team.

(h/t New York Post)

Reality

Donald J. Trump went to war with members of the media, holding an off-the-record meeting of executives and on-air talent.

In his meeting with the press, which the members believed they would be talking about his recent lack of transparency, Trump instead spent the entire time calling each of them liars right to their face, even singling out individual networks and reporters.

Trump never produced evidence for why he believed they were liars for simply reporting on the things he said.

The worst part to learn was the attendees did not fight back or at best put up mild resistance to Trump’s unsubstantiated charges.

The role of a free and open press is a foundation of democracy, separates us from other forms of government, and any interference from an overreaching state should be seen as an attack on our liberties.

So if this is the position the press is going to be taking this early in a Trump presidency, especially with someone who has an aversion to facts, then this should be taken very seriously otherwise we’ll be in a bad state of affairs.

 

Kellyanne Conway: ‘Why Do You Care’ About Trump’s Tweets?

Former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on Monday defended President-elect Donald Trump’s Twitter vendetta against the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” arguing that social media use is “a great way” to “cut through the noise or silence” and that Trump has the right to offer his criticism.

“Why do you care?” Conway said when asked by “New Day” host Chris Cuomo about Trump’s “Hamilton” feud. “Who is to say that he can’t do that, make a comment, spend five minutes on a tweet and making a comment and still be president-elect?”

Conway, a senior adviser to Trump, criticized media coverage of the social media controversy, saying that Trump is “just trying to cut through the nonsense of people telling Americans what is important to them, which we saw through the elections wasn’t true. People constantly being told this issue, this statement, this past transgression is important to you — and Americans said, ‘No, it’s not. What’s important to me is this 100-day plan.'”

(h/t CNN)

Reality

But that is not what Donald Trump is doing.

Taking a look at his past 10 tweets, half of them are personal attacks against those who have criticized him. And we should care because Trump has made a habit of intimidating those who disagree with him, both in the press and private citizens.

trump-tweet-timeline-2016-11

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIT9lD1z0TQ

Trump on Business Conflicts: You Knew Who You Were Voting For

As Donald Trump assured us during the campaign, someday he’ll turn his business into a “blind trust” operated by his children (right after they change the definition of what a “blind trust” is). For now, it appears Trump is still looking out for his own business interests by combining them with the interests of the president-elect.

The latest example comes from the New York Times, which reported on Monday evening that during a meeting with Nigel Farage days after the election, Trump encouraged the British politician and his pro-Brexit entourage to oppose offshore wind farms that threaten to ruin the view at one of his Scottish golf courses. Last year, Trump lost a long legal battle to block the construction of a wind farm near his resort.

“He did not say he hated wind farms as a concept; he just did not like them spoiling the views,” said Andy Wigmore, a media consultant who attended the meeting. Wigmore said he and his associates were already opposed to wind farms, but Trump “did suggest that we should campaign on it” and “spurred us in and we will be going for it.”

Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks initially denied the report, then stopped responding when informed that Wigmore described the conversation with Trump. But Trump took matters into his own hands, blasting the “crooked media” for focusing on his conflicts of interest. He tweeted, a short time after the Times story was published:

But the next day Mr. Trump was acknowledging a recent meeting with the British politician Nigel Farage, in which, The Times reported, he “encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses.”

Pressed about his business interests, Mr. Trump also said, “In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly.”

 

(h/t New York Magazine)

Trump Rails Against New York Times for Reporting On His Transition ‘Disarray’

Twitter

Roughly 10 hours after tweeting that the process of picking his cabinet was “very organized,” President-elect Donald Trump railed against a New York Times report that his transition team was “in a state of disarray” and U.S. allies were “struggling” to reach him.

“The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition,” Trump tweeted early Wednesday morning. “It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders.”

According to the Times report, Trump’s transition has been “marked by firings, infighting and revelations that American allies were blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world.”

But on Twitter, the president-elect asserted he’s taken “calls from many foreign leaders,” including Russia, the U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

“I am always available to them,” Trump tweeted, suggesting that the Times is “just upset that they looked like fools” in their coverage of his candidacy and are now taking it out on him.

On Sunday, Trump similarly criticized the paper’s “very poor and highly inaccurate coverage” of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in last Tuesday’s presidential election, claiming the paper “is losing thousands of subscribers” as a result.

A spokeswoman for the Times said Trump’s tweet was simply inaccurate.

“We’ve seen a surge in new subscriptions, both print and digital,” Eileen Murphy, senior vice president of communications for the Times, wrote in an email to Yahoo News. “And the rate of growth post-Election Day has been four times better than normal.”

He then claimed that the Times “sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me.” But the letter — sent by Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Dean Baquet to subscribers thanking them for their loyalty — did not include an apology.

Trump also took issue with the Times’ assertion that he “has suggested that more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.”

In an interview with the Times in March, however, Trump suggested exactly that.

In his interview “60 Minutes” which aired on CBS Sunday night, Trump said he’s going to be “very restrained” in his use of Twitter as commander in chief. But he said he would reserve the right to use it as a “method” to combat what he perceives as negative stories about him.

“I’m going to be very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump said. “I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out.”

Before his latest rant against the Times on Wednesday, Trump pushed back against reports that he had requested security clearances for three of his children.

“I am not trying to get ‘top level security clearance’ for my children,” he tweeted. “This was a typically false news story.”

But according to NBC News, Team Trump has asked that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, have top-secret clearance for the daily presidential briefing.

(h/t Yahoo News)

Trump Keeps Up Media Attacks With Misleading Tweets About New York Times

Twitter

President-elect Donald Trump sounded very much like presidential candidate Donald Trump on Sunday morning in a pair of misleading tweets about the New York Times.

According to the New York Times Co.’s latest earnings report, the number of print copies it sold in the third quarter was down from the same period in 2015, but the decline was more than offset by 116,000 new digital-only subscriptions. Overall, third-quarter circulation revenue rose 3 percent; through the first nine months of the year, circulation revenue was up 2.8 percent.

Since Trump launched his White House campaign in June 2015, digital-only news subscriptions to the Times have increased 35 percent, to more than 1.3 million.

Trump’s suggestion that the Times is bleeding readers because of “very poor and highly inaccurate coverage” does not square with the numbers.

The president-elect’s interpretation of a letter to subscribers as an apology for bad coverage is a stretch. Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. wrote Friday that one of the “inevitable questions” in the aftermath of the campaign is: “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?”

“As we reflect on this week’s momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism,” Sulzberger added.

Trump’s tweet mirrored coverage of the letter in some conservative media outlets, which seized on portions of Sulzberger’s message. “NY Times admits biased coverage on Trump,” read a headline on Newsmax. A headline on Breitbart News, chaired by Trump campaign chief executive Steve Bannon, read, “New York Times publisher promises to ‘rededicate’ paper to honest reporting.”

“Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting,” Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post.

Yet Sulzberger’s full letter makes clear that he was simply renewing a promise that he believes the Times fulfilled during the campaign.

“We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign,” he wrote. “You can rely on the New York Times to bring the same level of fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”

(h/t Washington Post)

Trump Taunts NBC Reporter From Podium at Florida Rally

Donald Trump went on a lengthy tirade against the media during a Wednesday rally, capping it off with him calling out an NBC reporter by name at the Miami event.

The Republican nominee helped spark loud “CNN sucks” chants at the rally before targeting NBC’s Katy Tur. She has been a favorite punching bag of his when criticizing the mainstream media, as he has called her called her out in press conferences and events.

“We have massive crowds,” Trump said. “There’s something happening. They’re not reporting it.”

“You’re not reporting it, Katy,” he continued, pointing at Tur. “There’s something happening, Katy. There’s something happening, Katy.”

Members of the media at the event said on Twitter that many in the audience turned and targeted Tur with an onslaught of boos:

Reality

The last time Mr. Trump assailed her by name, Katy Tur had to be escorted out of the rally and to her car by the Secret Service because the fervor he created became too dangerous for her.

In the same press conference where Trump asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, he blasted Katy Tur after she asked a series of questions, telling her to “be quiet.”

And finally, after four months of Trump bragging at rallies of his $1 million dollar donation to veteran charities, journalists uncovered the fact that Trump never donated any money and was lying the entire time. Donald Trump held a press conference to personally attack members of the media including Tur, calling her a “third-rate journalist.”

Media

Bloomberg Video

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