During a press conference Wednesday, his first since becoming president-elect, Trump declined to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who has served as a White House correspondent for CNN since the early days of the Trump campaign.
Acosta asked Trump if he could ask a question since the president-elect has spoken negatively against CNN.
Trump replied, “Not you, your organization is terrible.”
He also told Acosta “don’t be rude” and said, “you are fake news.”
You can watch the confrontation here.
According to Mashable, Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs noted an altercation between Acosta and Trump spokesman Sean Spicer after the event.
“Acosta then appeared on CNN and said Spicer threatened to remove him from future press conferences if a similar episode happened,” Mashable reported.
Acosta has been involved in White House reporting since 2013. He previously worked as a journalist at CBS and a national political reporter at CNN, according to Mashable.
The back-and-forth between Trump and the national news website comes a day after CNN reported that intelligence leaders shared information with Trump that linked the president-elect to Russia. In fact, the intelligence report said Russia has information on Trump that they are holding against him.
Despite Trump’s harsh comments, CNN stands by its reporting. The news organization said that it remains “fully confident in our reporting” and that the report informs people of the inner workings of government.
“We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report’s allegations,” CNN said in a statement. “Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.”
CNN also said its decision is different from that of BuzzFeed News, which published the full actual account of information (it contains some graphic information, which is why we haven’t linked to it).
BuzzFeed said in its report that the files were unverified, but decided to publish them “so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”
Media critics spoke out against the news organization Monday and Tuesday for releasing documents that may not be accurate at all.
“Critics will probably say that BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the document had more to do with asserting its own relevance than it did with public-spirited reporting. And BuzzFeed’s retort would likely be that the public deserves to see a report that hundreds of political insiders are talking about,” Poynter’s Kelly McBride wrote.
Instead, McBride said journalists need to do better and work to verify the documents.
She said that “the act of publishing the dossier in its entirety isn’t journalism. Vetting the document and determining its veracity? That’s the work of journalists in 2017, or any other year.”
The case against publishing amounts to arguing that journalists are the only ones who are qualified to see such allegations, and that only a handful of media organizations are entitled to make the decision about what is credible and what isn’t. Like it or not, that isn’t how journalism works any more. Information of all kinds emerges in a variety of ways, and then we all get to apply our critical intelligence to it—in public, in real time.
