President Donald Trump announces a deal to temporarily reopen
the government, in the Rose Garden of the White House, Friday, Jan. 25,
2019, in Washington. (Associated Press)
President Trump took aim at "one-sided Fake
Media coverage" and "bad journalism" Saturday in tweets referring to
coverage of former adviser Roger Stone's indictment and arrest and to
reports that layoffs had struck news outlets such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.
The
tweets came a day after the Trump tore into "Fake News CNN," which had a
camera crew outside Stone's home as he was being arrested by the FBI on
obstruction and other charges in connection with Special Counsel Robert
Mueller's Russia probe.
Trump on Saturday also mocked CBS News,
asserting that its reporting on Stone neglected to include details on
the "Fake and Unverified 'Dossier,'" which Trump described as "a total
phony conjob, that was paid for by Crooked Hillary."
Faulty
journalism has been a constant theme of Trump's for a long time, and
the president suggested Saturday that recent job cuts at news
organizations -- which have left around 1,000 journalists jobless,
according to reports -- were an indication that he was accurate in his
assessment.
“Ax falls quickly at BuzzFeed and Huffpost!” Headline,
New York Post," the president wrote. "Fake News and bad journalism have
caused a big downturn. Sadly, many others will follow. The people want
the Truth!"
BuzzFeed announced
this week that it was letting go 220 employees -- or about 15 percent
of its staff -- in a restructuring move. The news came just days after
the outlet published a since-discredited report that Trump had directed
his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about a potential
real estate deal in Moscow.
The office of Special Counsel Robert
Mueller took the rare step of issuing a brief statement saying the story
was "not accurate," further escalating Trump’s claim that most news
outlets are not to be trusted. BuzzFeed has stood by its reporting.
The
Huffington Post, meanwhile, laid off 20 reporters as part of job cuts
at Verizon, whose media division also includes AOL and Yahoo News. The
parent company's media cuts represented a 7 percent workforce reduction.
Other media organizations that laid off workers last week included
Gannett – the nation’s largest newspaper chain, which owns USA Today.
In
response to Trump, BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith tweeted that
the president's remarks were “a disgusting thing to say about dozens of
American workers who just lost their jobs.”
HuffPost
Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen also chimed in. "1,000 journalists lost
their jobs last week," Polgreen wrote. "Ordinary people with rent to
pay, families to support, student loan bills coming due. They are
workers like any other who do not deserve this cruelty."
Many of the journalists left jobless received death threats online and anti-Semitic messages, the Hill reported.
Trump
often accuses the media of unfair coverage and not highlighting his
“accomplishments” enough. On Thursday, for example, the president
complained about a lack of coverage of corporate earnings.
Trump's tirade followed a storm of criticism against the media from many conservatives, particularly over coverage of the Catholic high school students
from Covington, Ky., who were vilified online for allegedly harassing a
Native American man -- until additional video footage showed that the
MAGA-hat-wearing kids were not the aggressors they had been made out to
be.