The White House has defended a decision to bar several news outlets from a news briefing amid a widening feud between the Trump administration and the mainstream media.
Several major news organizations, including CNN, The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times, The Hill, The Daily Mail and BuzzFeed News were left out from Friday’s off-camera briefing, which was hosted by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Spicer defended the move to bar some reporters and vowed that the White House would “aggressively push back” against “false stories.”
“We are going to aggressively push back. We’re just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there,” he said.
The bar came hours after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another attack against the media, calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”
“A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are — they are the enemy of the people,” Trump said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday.
The president continued his assault against the “fake news media” in a tweet later in the evening, singling out reporting by The New York Times and CNN as “a joke.”
Conservative news organizations such as Breitbart News, The Washington Times and One America News Network, which are seen as being friendly to the Trump administration, were given a spot in the “gaggle.”
The Associated Press, USA Today and Time magazine refused to attend in protest.
The unusual move came after a report by CNN on Thursday that a White House official had asked the FBI to publicly dispute a New York Times article last week detailing communications between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence officials during the election.
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