White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday challenged the “lame” media to cover President Trump’s accomplishments as much as his tweets and ripped outlets for suggesting that her boss is a liar.
At a media roundtable, a Huffington Post reporter characterized Trump as “serially untruthful,” prompting Conway to suggest that it’s the media that is lazy in its reporting on the president by ignoring successes on job creation and deregulation as it focuses on conspiracy theories about first lady Melania Trump and the Russia affair.
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“Seriously, that’s what journalism has become?” asked Conway at the breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
Several outlets have tried to count up Trump misstatements, and Conway said that many of the examples are of Trump getting a number or detail slightly wrong. And in doing that, she added, the media has shown that it has a double standard for covering Democratic administrations and Trump.
For examples, she cited Hillary Rodham Clinton’s false claim that the Benghazi slayings of U.S. diplomats were caused by an anti-Muslim video and former President Obama’s promise that Americans would be able to keep their doctor under Obamacare.
“Has the president said something that even comes close to it was a videotape that caused the loss of life of four people in Benghazi? Has he said anything close to, ‘You can keep your plan, you can keep your doctor?’” she said.
Huffington Post White House reporter Shirish Dáte prompted her comments when he said that “the president says a lot of untruths, like everyday,” and added that he is “serially untruthful.”
Conway, one of the most prominent surrogates for the president, said that Dáte was just grandstanding. “I think you are just throwing that out there to be part of the news cycle today. He is not serially untruthful,” said Conway.
She added that “I never hear from you” in his reporting of White House stories and slammed Huffington Post for focusing on negative angles. “Even when we try to do good things,” she said, “I don’t seem much positive coverage coming from your outlet.”
