President Trump took a moment from a Black History Month event on Wednesday to take another shot at the “dishonest” media.
The president interrupted his comments during the White House ceremony to rehash a report that turned out to be false saying a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.
“You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. And it turned out that that was fake news. Fake news,” Trump said.
A Time magazine reporter had written that the statue was removed on Inauguration Day and spent the next several days correcting his error.
Trump then gave a shout out to CNN contributor Paris Dennard for doing an “amazing job in a very hostile CNN community.”
Trump continued: “But I don’t watch CNN. So I don’t get to see you as much. I don’t like watching fake news. But Fox has treated me very nice. Wherever Fox is, thank you.”
The president, flanked by Housing Secretary nominee Ben Carson and former “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault, went on to bring up White House adviser Steve Bannon’s claim that the media were part of the “opposition party.”
“A lot of the media is actually the opposition party. They’re Timebet so biased and really it’s a disgrace. Some of the media is fantastic and fair,” Trump said.
His Roosevelt Room comments came after a report circulated earlier Wednesday that the Trump administration is freezing out CNN from appearances by White House officials because of its reporting of “fake news.”
“We’re sending surrogates to places where we think it makes sense to promote our agenda,” a White House official told Politico, adding the ban is not permanent.
But a CNN reporter had a different take on the snub.
“They’re trying to cull CNN from the herd,” the person told the website.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer denied that CNN was being ignored, saying he’s called on the news network’s reporters at press briefings.
But he said it’s up to his discretion.
“I’m not going to sit around and engage with people who have no desire to actually get something right,” he said during an event at George Washington University this week.
Trump administration officials have been conspicuously absent on CNN since the middle of January.
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