President Donald Trump repeatedly complained about unfair media coverage while defending his administration’s performance on Thursday.
“Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system,” Trump said, echoing many of the complaints he made as a presidential candidate.
“The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control…” he said. “I turn on the news and I see stories of chaos. And yet it is the exact opposite. The administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”
The president’s remarks came at a press conference at which he announced his nominee for secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta. But Trump spent nearly 20 minutes defending his performance and listing the accomplishments of his first month in office.
“I inherited a mess,” Trump said three times before listing his achievements, including pledges from companies to hire more American workers.
The president, who has been criticized for ignoring questioners from the mainstream media when holding his news conferences with foreign leaders, then took questions from a number of reporters with mainstream outlets, starting with NPR and going to NBC News, ABC News and CNN, among others.
While taking questions, however, Trump called recent stories about his campaign advisers’ communications with Russia “fake news” and repeatedly said the New York Times was “failing.”
“Russia is fake news,” the president said.
He went on to say “I’ve never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media.”
“I never get phone calls from the media,” Trump added. “How do they write a story like that in the Wall Street Journal without calling me? How do they write a story in The New York Times…”
“I can handle a bad story better than anybody, as long as it’s true,” the president said. “But I’m not OK when it’s fake.”
He also specifically attacked leaks to the press, and outlets who run information based on leaks.
“How does the press get this information that’s classified? How do they do it?” he asked. “[I]t’s an illegal process and the press should be ashamed of themselves. But more importantly, the people that gave out the information to the press should be ashamed of themselves, really ashamed.”