White House press secretary Sean Spicer offered an impassioned defense on Monday of the Trump administration’s treatment of reporters, just hours after the president branded the media “the opposition party.”
Speaking at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, the administration’s top spokesman said the president demonstrated during his first week in office that he is committed to giving members of the press as much access to him as possible.
“When you look at how he’s treated the press corps so far, we’ve brough them into major meetings, we brought them aboard Air Force One,” Spicer said.
He added, “I think when you compare what we’ve done with others in the past, I think we’ve done a very good job. You look at what we’ve done since he’s been inaugurated and I think it’s been above and beyond.”
Spicer’s confidence in the adminstration’s relationship with the press largely contradicts the sentiment many outlets in the mainstream media share. Reporters have often objected to the president’s hostility toward them and were no less eager to lodge complaints against him and his staff after Spicer slammed the media at an impromptu, no-questions-allowed press conference during Trump’s first weekend in office.
“We’re not perfect,” Spicer said Monday evening when asked about what many view as an increasingly adversarial relationship between the new administration and the media. “We’re not going to get everything right.”
But Spicer also said that reporters have never been so unwilling to give a president and his aides the benefit of the doubt when certain situations arise.
“It’s never about the good,” he said, referring to the press corps’ coverage of Trump.
“The press should be skeptical … but there’s a difference between a skeptical press and the default of always being negative,” Spicer charged.
