CNN hasn’t been entirely iced out by the Trump administration after all.
At the first press briefing under new White House spokesman Sean Spicer, CNN reporter Jim Acosta was called on to ask a question, though the opportunity came well into the event and after many of the network’s competitors had been called upon.
Even before his election, President Trump has been a loud critic of CNN, which he says does not cover him fairly.
The feud reached a peak earlier this month when Trump, while answering questions at a press conference, called CNN “fake news” and refused to allow Acosta time to ask a question.
Trump’s most recent issue with CNN came when the network published information, a day before the press conference, about the existence of an unsubstantiated report circling among intelligence officials and which contained lewd allegations about Trump’s personal life.
At the press conference on Monday, Acosta asked Spicer about why the president and his staff made “an issue” over the crowd size at the inauguration on Friday.
“Did it bother the president that much that he felt you needed to come out here and straighten that out for us and why did he choose the CIA as the venue to talk about that?” said Acosta.
He and Spicer engaged in a lengthy back and forth over the size of the attending audience, which most evidence indicates was smaller than at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
