Donald Trump on Saturday renewed his onslaught against major US news networks, accusing them of launching a “vicious” assault on his presidency as he seized on a reporting error by CNN.
In an early-morning tweet, the US president said “Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday. They were caught red handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News.”
Trump sounded the same anti-media narrative in a speech Friday in Florida when, pointing to a reporting error by ABC, he said, “Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making? They’ve been apologizing left and right.”
The US president regularly rails against top news outlets, both broadcast networks and newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
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CNN reported early Friday that the president and son Donald Trump Jr. had received an email providing a web address and decryption key allowing access to hacked documents from the WikiLeaks site before such documents were publicly available.
But the network’s timing was wrong, by a single digit. It soon posted a correction saying the information had been sent to the Trumps not on September 4, 2016, but on September 14 — a day after WikiLeaks made the documents public, a crucial difference.
Trump tweeted Saturday: “Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”
ABC, for its part, recently suspended investigative journalist Brian Ross for reporting erroneously that Trump had directed adviser Michael Flynn to make contact with Russia before the November election, when in fact the directive came afterward.
In one tweet Saturday, Trump said Ross should “be immediately fired.”
AFP
