The White House is not backing down from its decision to suspend CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s permanent White House press credentials, a move that comes after President Trump ratcheted up his attacks on the media and hurled insults at individual reporters.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Thursday defended the administration’s suspension of Acosta’s credentials following a tense exchange a day earlier when Acosta refused to yield the microphone to a White House intern during a press conference with the president.
“The question is: did the reporter make contact or not? The video is clear, he did. We stand by our statement,” Sanders said in a statement Thursday.
Sanders accused Acosta of “placing his hands” on the female intern, an assertion Acosta vehemently denied, and shared an edited video that had previously been posted by an editor at InfoWars, a conspiratorial website. Sanders was hit by questions of whether the video had been deceptively edited.
[Read: Debate rages over whether Sarah Sanders shared doctored video of Jim Acosta microphone tussle]
In response to the video Sanders tweeted, the White House News Photographers Association said it was “appalled” to that the White House press secretary “may have shared a manipulated video” of Acosta’s interaction with the young woman.
“As visual journalists, we know that manipulating images is manipulating truth. It’s deceptive, dangerous and unethical,” Whitney Shefte, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Knowingly sharing manipulated images is equally problematic, particularly when the person sharing them is a representative of our country’s highest office with vast influence over public opinion.”
The move to revoke Acosta’s press credentials, and the White House’s doubling down, followed what was an escalation of Trump’s rhetoric against the media during Wednesday’s press conference, rhetoric some hoped he would soften after Democrats took control of the House on Tuesday.
During the lengthy — his longest to date — and free-wheeling press conference at the White House, the president launched a broadside against the larger media but delivered personal attacks on specific reporters.
“Very hostile, such a hostile media,” Trump said. “It’s so sad.”
The president then chided multiple reporters during the course of the event, including the contentious back-and-forth with Acosta.
“Honestly, I think you should let me run the country; you run CNN,” Trump told Acosta. “And if you did it well, your ratings would be much higher.”
As Acosta began to ask another question of the president, a White House intern appeared to take away the microphone, which Acosta did not let her do.
“That’s enough. Put down the mic,” Trump told Acosta. “I’ll tell you what: CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN. … You’re a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible. And the way you treat other people are horrible. You shouldn’t treat people that way.”
CNN defended Acosta after the press conference, saying Trump’s “ongoing attacks” on the media are “dangerous” and “disturbingly un-America.”
But it wasn’t only Acosta who the president went after.
After Peter Alexander, a White House correspondent for NBC News, came to Acosta’s defense, Trump said he is “not a big fan of yours either.”
“You aren’t the best,” the president told Alexander.
Then, when April Ryan, a correspondent with American Urban Radio Networks, tried to ask Trump a question about voter suppression, the president told her to “sit down.”
“Excuse me, I’m not responding to you,” Trump told Ryan. “I’m talking to this gentleman. Will you please sit down?”
One of the most notable exchanges the president had Wednesday was in response to a question posed by Yamiche Alcindor, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, who asked about Trump’s characterization of himself as a “nationalist” and whether it emboldened white nationalists.
In response, Trump repeatedly claimed it was a “racist question.”
“I know you have it written down, and you’re going to tell me,” Trump told Alcindor, who is African-American. “Let me tell you: It’s a racist question.”
The president has long come under scrutiny for his tone toward the media, which he has called “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” At rallies, Trump often points to the reporters as his supporters chant “fake news” and “CNN sucks.” Republicans have alleged liberal bias in the media for decades, but Trump has been notably combative in his relations with the media.
Trump told reporters he believes that any lowering of the volume would start not with him, but with the press.
“If you would cover, and there was a very interesting story written in a very good paper recently that talked about the fact that it isn’t good what the media is doing, and that I do have the right to fight back because I’m treated very unfairly,” he said. “So I do fight back. And I’m fighting back not for me; I’m fighting back for the people of this country.”
