After President Trump referred to the mainstream media as ‘the enemy’, reporters were furious. Listen as Larry spoke with James Rosen, the Chief Washington Correspondent for Fox News, about the media’s coverage of President Trump and his experience as a reporter under President Obama.
During the interview, Rosen called on the Trump administration to keep their unnecessary inaccuracies to a minimum:
O’Connor: When you hear reporters say that Sean Spicer or Donald Trump only calling on certain news outlets, and not calling on AP and CNN, is in some way eroding the First Amendment, I think – hopefully – you can help put that in perspective a little bit.
Rosen: Nothing that we’ve seen yet from the Trump administration, at least in its first month, approaches in seriousness or nature the kind of assault on press freedom we witnessed under Barack Obama. One does not have to travel all the way to the primetime lineup of Fox News in order to hear such sentiments expressed about Barack Obama and his treatment of the news media at the time of the controversy involving Fox News and me. We heard such sentiments expressed pretty plainly from the likes of Leonard Downie, the former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, Jill Abramson, at that time the Executive Editor of the New York Times, David Sanger, the Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times. All these people pronounced the Obama administration the most secretive and controlling, with respect to the press, of any administration including Richard Nixon in modern time.
O’Connor: Now given that – and I agree with you – the AP and Sharyl Attkisson and many other reporters who felt major pressure from the Justice Department for doing their job, as you just mentioned. Given that, do you agree that the Trump administration could improve their standing with the media with just a few tweaks here and there as to how they relate to each other, or do you think this is a strategy of this President?
Rosen: The very first thing the Trump administration can do to improve its relations with the news media would be to stop saying factual untrue things. Whether it relates to the size of the inauguration crowd or the margin of victory the President enjoyed relative to other recent margins of victory in the electoral college and so forth. These are quite unnecessary inaccuracies for this administration to be propounding from public podia. And it doesn’t serve them well.
CALL: 202-432-WMAL (9625) | 888-630-WMAL (9625)
