US President Donald Trump's chief strategist Stephen Bannon says mainstream media should feel “humiliated” for their coverage of Trump during the election and therefore “shut up and listen.” A CNN news anchor publicly responded with a “no.”
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Bannon, who’s the former head of conservative right-leaning news website Breitbart, said in an interview with New York Times on Wednesday.
“I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States,” Bannon added.
Labeling the media the “opposition” to the new US administration, Bannon referred to the media’s “rigged” – in President Trump’s own words – reporting on him in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. The media’s inability to accept Trump as president has been showing also in the most recent tensions with Trump’s administration over the size of the crowd at his inauguration, which the White House said was intentionally diminished by the media in an attempt to “delegitimize” the president.
Bannon slammed the news media for being biased against Trump and out of touch with the American public.
“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” he said of the election outcome, dubbing it “a humiliating defeat that [the media] will never wash away, that will always be there.” He noted that the media did not even attempt to rehabilitate itself after biased reporting on the elections.
“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign. Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign. That’s why you have no power. You were humiliated,” Bannon stated.
READ MORE: White House promises to battle attempts by US media to ‘delegitimize’ Trump
“The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work,” he stressed responding to a question regarding Trump press secretary Sean Spicer allegedly losing his credibility after he chided the media for misrepresenting Trump’s inauguration.
Bannon’s words were not taken lightly by the public, with people on Twitter venting their anger at what they regarded as an attack at freedom of speech.
Apparently unabashed by warnings raining down from the new administration and Bannon’s words, CNN, which recently earned the title of ‘fake news’ from Trump, decided to speak out. In a broadcast on Thursday, CNN anchor Jake Tapper reacted to Bannon’s advice, saying, “A reminder that the president’s top aide just told the New York Times that the press should keep its mouth shut. Ha, no.”
Tapper’s response drew another wave of comments from the online community, however, these were rather varied in nature – while some praised Tapper for bravery and setting an example...
...many pointed to the fact that CNN had lost its credibility due to recent scandals surrounding the outlet.
When Trump surprised the media by winning the election last November, some news outlets, such as the New York Times, issued a mea culpa. CNN did not, and has continued publishing stories which were not taken well by the president or his staff. Earlier this month the broadcaster appeared at the center of a fake news controversy, having reported on an unverified memo that suggested that the Russian government was blackmailing then-President-elect Trump with compromising personal and financial information about him and that he has deep ties with the Russian government.
Despite intelligence insiders confirming that the much-hyped dossier was a fake, CNN’s president claimed last week his network’s credibility is “higher than ever,” adding it is a “mistake” of the new US administration to be at odds with the news media.
Later, just ahead of Trump’s inauguration, CNN aired a segment speculating what might happen if a “disaster” wiped out everyone present at the event, suggesting a scenario that would leave Trump and his entire team dead and an Obama administration official in charge. The “wishful thinking” report drew a flood of criticism from Trump supporters.
Last weekend, in a speech at CIA headquarters, Trump declared he was in “a running war” with the media and called journalists “among the most dishonest people on Earth.”
When asked about this statement and what is to come next in his rift with the media during an interview with ABC earlier this week, the president merely warned that “demeaning” his achievements will result in plummeting approval ratings and “people turning” against the media.