U.S. President Donald Trump has a “healthy respect” for the press, despite labelling them an “enemy of the American people,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said.
“He has a healthy respect for the press, but I think it’s a two-way street,” Spicer said.
“I think the president understands that certain outlets have gone out of their way to not be completely accurate and fair in their coverage of what’s going on.”
Spicer used a recent incident regarding Trump’s dinner with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, during which news broke of a missile launch in North Korea as an example of how the media was misrepresenting the facts.
READ MORE: Donald Trump brands mainstream media ‘enemy of the American people’
Trump and Abe were seen in the restaurant of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club discussing the matter, with what appeared to be information about the launch. They later held a news conference outside the hotel.
But Spicer said they didn’t have classified information in the open and said the media jumped to conclusions.
“So when you talk about coverage, we have a free press, we have the right for people to say and do what they believe, but at some point, it is incumbent on people to try get it right and in that case it wasn’t even attempted,” Spicer said.
CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all reported the story. Along with Facebook pictures of Trump and Abe surrounded by advisors, they spoke to other members of the exclusive Mar-a-Lago club to confirm the story.
While all coverage raised an issue with security on discussing the incident in the Mar-a-Lago, none outright declared the information as classified, likely because there was no way to confirm whether or not it was.
Since the pictures came out, the House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz has started probing how the White House handles sensitive information, asking White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus whether the documents at the table were classified or not.
Continued attacks on the media
Trump has repeatedly accused the political press of being dishonest and suggested any negative coverage of his administration was “fake news.”
He wrote the comments on Twitter one day after last week’s press conference in which he lambasted journalists and accused them of deliberately misrepresenting the facts. The conference was widely criticized by mainstream media.
His attack on the press was also widely discussed on the weekend, by critics and friends alike. U.S. Republican Senator John McCain warned that suppressing the free press was “how dictators get started.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Sunday distanced himself from President Donald Trump’s assessment of the media as “the enemy of the American people,” saying during his first trip to the Middle East that he had no problems with the press.
READ MORE : Suppressing free press is ‘how dictators get started’: John McCain on Trump’s media comments
German Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasized the importance of a free press at the conference on Saturday, saying, “I have high respect for journalists. We’ve always had good results, at least in Germany, by relying on mutual respect.”
But his White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, “I think you should take (Trump’s Twitter statement) seriously.”
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