White House press secretary Sarah Sanders blasted the news media on Monday by saying reporters’ anti-Trump bias has spiraled “out of control” in recent weeks.
Her criticism came during a tense exchange at the daily press briefing, where she was asked to address President Trump’s attacks on a Washington Post reporter who tweeted – and later deleted – a photo that mischaracterized the crowd size at his Pensacola rally last Friday.
“The president is simply calling out a very direct and false accusation lodged against him. There was nothing more than an individual trying to put their bias into their reporting,” Sanders said about Trump’s decision to tweet about the Washington Post tweet.
“And it’s something that, frankly, has gotten a little bit out of control,” she continued. “A number of outlets have had to retract and change and rewrite and make editor’s notes to a number of different stories, some of them with major impacts, including moving markets.”
The president’s top spokeswoman was alluding to a report by ABC News’ Brian Ross on the day former national security adviser Michael Flynn pled guilty to lying to federal investigators.
Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay after falsely reporting that Trump had directed Flynn to make contact with Russian officials during last year’s presidential campaign. Some claim the false report led the stock market to nosedive 300 points.
“The ABC report by Brian Ross, I think that was pretty misleading to the American people,” Sanders said. “And I think that it’s very telling that that individual had to be suspended because of that reporting.”
Sanders told reporters they need to “own up” to their mistakes if they wish to maintain credibility. That comment prompted a heated back-and-forth with CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, who said reporters do take responsibility for their errors.
“Sometimes, and a lot of times you don’t,” Sanders fired back. “There’s a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people, something that happens regularly.”
“I’m not done,” Sanders added, talking over objections from other reporters in the briefing room.
“You cannot say that it’s an honest mistake when you’re purposefully putting out information that you know to be false, or when you’re taking information that hasn’t been validated, that hasn’t been offered with any credibility, and has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance,” she said.
Sanders’ sharp criticism of the media comes amid a recent flood of false or error-filled reports about the Trump administration by major outlets.
In addition to ABC’s misreporting on Flynn, CNN was forced to correct a story late last week in which the outlet claimed that WikiLeaks told Donald Trump Jr. that they planned to publish a batch of stolen emails before they were actually released.
The initial report claimed the president’s son was tipped off on Sept. 4, when in fact the email directing him to the stolen documents was sent on Sept. 14, after they had already been posted to Twitter.
“I won’t hold my breath for an apology, or for you to call out your puppet masters on the left that fed you BS knowing you would gleefully run with it without ever checking the other side,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted after CNN first published its report.
“You got played,” he added.
