President
Donald Trump started and finished a speech he gave at the CIA headquarters
Saturday afternoon by criticizing the "dishonest media." Several of
the things he said were inaccurate.
Some members
of the media expressed astonishment about the setting and the tone of the
speech.
"The
stars on the wall behind Trump, who is talking about his crowd sizes and
complaining about the media, mark dead CIA operatives," Los Angeles Times
columnist Cathleen Decker tweeted.
"The
president just tried to rally CIA workforce around the idea that media is the
enemy. Let that sink in," wrote Mark Mazzetti, a Washington investigations
editor at The New York Times.
Trump
himself called it a "war," further ratcheting up his extreme
anti-media rhetoric from the campaign trail.
"As you
know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest
human beings on Earth," Trump said.
Some CIA
staffers in the room applauded the insult, but the senior leadership in the
front rows did not, according to a CNN producer who was there.
"They
sort of made it sound like I had a 'feud' with the intelligence
community." Nonsense, Trump said, "it is exactly the opposite, and
they understand that too."
In fact,
Trump repeatedly and publicly questioned the country's intelligence services
amid reporting about Russian attempts to interfere in the election.
"He
referred to it repeatedly in tweets as 'intelligence' in quotes. He was
undermining" them, CNN chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto
said afterward.
CNN chief
political correspondent Dana Bash added, "It's unfortunate that he said
that there, on hallowed ground. It happens to be not true that we conflated
things that he said. All you have to do is look at his Twitter feed to see what
he said."
Trump also
exaggerated the size of the crowd at his swearing-in ceremony Friday and
complained about what he said was unfair coverage.
He said it
looked to him "like a million, million and a half people" were in
attendance for his inauguration, but that a television network (which he did
not name) "showed a field where there was practically nobody standing
there."
He also said
the crowd "went all the way back to the Washington Monument," but it
did not.
Major
television networks shared a camera at the top of the monument that showed lots
of open space during Trump's inauguration.
Trump even
described the inauguration weather inaccurately, saying that the skies became
"really sunny" after his speech, when in fact it remained cloudy.
At the
beginning of the speech, Trump struck a more positive tone about the press,
saying "they did treat me nicely on that speech yesterday."
But at the
end, he returned to his anti-media rhetoric. He made a brief mistake by a Time
magazine reporter, Zeke Miller, sound like an ongoing scandal.
When a small
group of journalists, known as a "pool," was allowed into the Oval
Office on Friday evening, there was some confusion about whether a bust of
Martin Luther King, Jr. was still there. The bust had been controversial when
former President Obama moved it into the Oval Office, replacing a bust of
Winston Churchill that had been there.
Pool
reporter Zeke Miller of Time initially couldn't see the MLK bust, and he sent
word to the rest of the press corps that it had been removed.
But it was
still there, albeit out of Miller's line of sight. A correction went out to the
press corps within half an hour.
Trump press
secretary Sean Spicer tweaked Miller about the incident on Twitter, calling it
"a reminder of the media danger of tweet first check facts later."
Miller
apologized to his colleagues, and Spicer tweeted, "Apology accepted."
Trump said
the incident showed "how dishonest the media is." He said the MLK
bust removal was a "big story," when in fact it was not treated like
a big story by any major news outlets.
Trump
concluded his comments about the press by saying, "I love honesty. I like
honest reporting."
Photo credit:
CNNMoney
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