White House Spokesfolk Echo Trump Attacks on Press

The White House's top two spokespeople took to the Washington Examiner to slam the Washington Post and other media outlets, accusing them of "breathless partisanship, rampant editorializing and obvious bias."

In an op ed, new press secretary Stephanie Grisham and principal deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley appeared particularly ticked off by a Washington Post story suggesting the summer had been one of lost opportunities and few accomplishments for the President.

They said the opposite was true and the Post reporters had "published an opinion article they claimed was news but that instead pushed their own personal political narrative."

"The truth is, Trump racked up many well-documented victories," they said, which did not make it into the article. Those included "the President’s directive to ease all federal student loan debt for disabled veterans," or "the first time in history a sitting United States president walked across the DMZ into North Korea," or "the first stage of the president’s historic trade deal with Japan."

But two of the Administration's chief point people with the press did not confine their criticisms to the Post.

"It is impossible to trust the media when the executive director of the 'New York Times' is caught on tape outlining plans to transition its coverage from the Russian hoax to another false narrative about Trump and racism," they wrote. "Or when TV networks accused the president of “manufacturing a crisis” at our southern border, only to later flip-flop and blame him for Congress’ refusal to fix that very crisis."

And given the open questioning about the President's sanity, they said, "No wonder the national media’s popularity sits somewhere between smallpox and the plague."

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.