WASHINGTON — (CNN) On Tuesday morning President-elect Donald Trump backed out of a meeting he had called with The New York Times.

Hours later, he was in the Times building, complaining about the paper’s coverage of him.

The visit included an on-the-record meeting at which Times staff was able to ask questions of Trump, as several Times reporters live-tweeted the proceedings.

What resulted was a wide-ranging discussion — but one that began with Trump criticizing the Times’ coverage, as he had similarly criticized coverage in a meeting with network executives and anchors on Monday.

“I have great respect for the New York Times. I have tremendous respect,” Trump said, according to the Times’ Mike Grynbaum.

But, he added, “I think I’ve been treated very rough… I will say the Times is about the roughest of all.” According to Grynbaum, Trump also said, “You could make the case the Washington Post was bad, but every once in while I actually got a good article.”

The Times’ Maggie Haberman tweeted that Trump said he felt he’d been treated unfairly during the campaign, but wanted to improve his relationship with the paper.

According to Grynbaum, Trump’s comments about the Times’ coverage of him lasted for about four minutes.

Much like the conversation itself, the back-and-forth that preceded the meeting showed Trump’s impulsive nature and his combative approach toward top news organizations.

A little after 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted to announce that the meeting had been canceled.

Around three and a half hours later, his press secretary Hope Hicks told CNNMoney that it was back on.

Trump had originally asked for a meeting with Times executives, which is off the record, and also agreed to meet on the record with reporters and columnists.

The Times announced the meeting on Monday.

But on Tuesday morning, Trump said on Twitter that the “terms and conditions” had changed at the last minute — a claim The Times denied, saying it was in fact Trump who had tried to alter the conditions.

“Not nice,” Trump said in an early morning tweet. He called the newspaper “failing,” a favorite insult.

In a second tweet minutes later, the president-elect said: “Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes. In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!”

A front-page story in The Times on Tuesday questioned whether Trump’s business deals will test a provision of the Constitution that blocks office-holders from accepting certain gifts and profits from foreign governments.

The Times and other news organizations have also reported extensively on the unprecedented conflicts of interest posed by Trump’s hundreds of business holdings around the world.

The Times also reported that Trump recently asked British politician Nigel Farage to oppose offshore wind farms that Trump believed would damage the view from one of his Scottish golf courses.

The Times said it only learned through Trump’s tweets that the meeting was off.

“We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told CNNMoney.

She said Trump’s representatives had asked only for a private meeting, with nothing on the record.

But she said the two sides later agreed to a small off-the-record session and a larger, on-the-record session with reporters and columnists.

In a third tweet, Trump said The New York Times had “announced” that “complaints about them are at a 15 year high.”

In a November 19 column, the newspaper’s public editor, Liz Spayd, said the number of complaints to her office is “five times the normal level.”

She said letters to the editor, which are not necessarily complaints about coverage, are coming in at the highest level since September 11, 2001.

“There is a searing level of dissatisfacton out there with many aspects of the coverage,” she wrote.

Trump responded that he “can fully understand that,” but he wondered why the paper would announce that complaints were up.

The reason, simply, is that the role of the public editor is to critique the newspaper’s coverage and serve as liaison between readers and the editors.

On Monday, Trump met off the record with executives and anchors from the nation’s biggest television networks to Trump Tower.

Sources told CNN that he complained about media coverage and was highly critical of CNN and other news organizations.

The sources said he also answered questions, listened to journalists’ arguments about the importance of access, and committed to making improvements.

–CNNMoney’s David Goldman and Chris Isidore contributed to this report.