Donald Trump

The escalating conflict between the president and the media has diverted attention not just from Trump’s failures but his claimed successes as well.

A string of high-profile corrections and retractions by major news organizations on stories about President Trump or his allies have fueled more allegations of bias in the mainstream press.

Long accustomed to chronicling threats against the media in other countries, free press organizations are turning their attention to extreme rhetoric and threatened violence against reporters at home as President Donald Trump and his allies ramp up their attacks on the mainstream media.

How can America have a feel-good birthday when one of the pillars of our 241-year-old republic is under near-daily assault from the highest levels of the government?

By tweeting a doctored video clip of himself beating a figure representing the network, President Trump drew bipartisan rebukes from lawmakers. Historians suggested his social-media attacks are lowering the bar for what is considered appropriate presidential decorum in fighting perceived media enemies.

Some in the White House see the president’s feud with the press as giving ammunition to his base. To many inside the White House, as well as outside allies, what looked like a public relations debacle last week amounted to an abundance of “winning” — a Trumpian catchphrase playfully repeated Friday by some West Wing officials, even as they were discomfited by the Brzezinski broadside.

The newly constituted FCC is conservative and deregulatory, but in a way you would expect had any of the establishment Republicans won the White House last November. When Trump won, I worried that he would stack the FCC with nut-job loyalists so that he could follow through with his threats against the media. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski postponed a vacation in order to respond to President Donald Trump’s Twitter attack yesterday in an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post headlined: “Donald Trump Is Not Well.”

In a series of morning tweets, the president went after Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, who have criticized Trump on their MSNBC show Morning Joe. “I heard poorly rated @Morning Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came … to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Donald Trump and his allies believe he’s gained a tactical advantage in his war with the media. As he escalates his attacks on the “failing media,” Trump and his allies are increasingly convinced that recent evidence, including the retracted CNN piece on an aspect of the Russia investigations, will prove to skeptical voters that the mainstream media has a vendetta against the administration.

Trump wrote in a Tuesday morning tweet, “Wow, CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer is leading a search for his own replacement on the briefing room podium as part of a larger plan to shake up the White House communications operation, according to two people with knowledge of the effort. Last week, Spicer and Reince Priebus, White House chief of staff, reached out to Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham about the role of press secretary and Daily Mail editor David Martosko about the role of communications director, according to a White House official.

CNN chief Jeff Zucker says the level of threats faced by his journalists is more serious than people realize and he lays the blame squarely at the feet of President Donald Trump and other politicians he says try to delegitimize the press. Zucker called it “unconscionable and dangerous and they should know better.”

ABC News chief James Goldston on Tuesday made a surprising admission about the U.S. leader during a keynote address to the Banff World Media Festival — Trump has overseen a renaissance of journalism in America. “This [Trump] administration has given us a true clarity of purpose about what we do as journalists every day. He has single-handedly shaken up journalism, he has reinvigorated journalism,” declared Goldston, before adding, “It feels like a new golden age.”

President Trump intends to nominate Jessica Rosenworcel for a new term on the FCC, paving her way for her return to the commission after her tenure lapsed at the end of last year. The FCC currently has two vacancies, and is facing a third. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s term expires at the end of this month.

President Trump went after the “Fake News Media” early this morning, accusing the press of publishing false stories. “The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “Purposely incorrect stories and phony sources to meet their agenda of hate. Sad!”

In what appears to be a political media first, a Super Pac controlled by President Trump has released an ad attacking the character of a witness in advance of a highly anticipated Senate hearing. The ad, entitled “Showboat,” was released Tuesday by Trump’s Great America Alliance and attacks the character of former FBI Director James Comey, who is scheduled to speak publicly Thursday morning during a Senate hearing.

President Trump swiped at media outlets in a tweet Tuesday morning, saying that media members “hate” his use of social media. “The FAKE MSM is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out,” Trump tweeted.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said he will step down from Trump’s business advisory council, protesting the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate deal. “Protecting our planet and driving economic growth are critical to our future, and they aren’t mutually exclusive,” Iger said in a statement. “I deeply disagree with the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.”

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kathy Griffin says she went way too far when she appeared in a brief video Tuesday holding what looked like President Donald Trump’s bloody, severed head. […]

Several officials say White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is no longer expected to do a daily, on-camera briefing after Trump’s foreign trip, with Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appearing behind the lectern more frequently.

On Tuesday, President Trump warmly welcomed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the White House. Just hours later, we found out that Trump would like to put reporters in jail. There’s a connection here. And it’s not good news for America’s journalists or the citizens who depend on them to hold their government accountable.

The White House announced Tuesday that President Trump will nominate David Redl to be the next administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Redl currently is chief counsel at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and is the principal legal adviser to Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Republicans on the committee regarding communications and technology matters.

Along with asking former FBI Director James Comey to drop the bureau’s investigation of Michael Flynn, the New York Times reported Tuesday that President Trump also talked about putting reporters in jail for publishing classified information. The information came to light after Comey wrote a detailed memo for his files about his conversation with Trump and the contents were provided to the Times.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former first lady of San Francisco and current Fox News host, is in conversations with the Trump administration about becoming White House press secretary, she said in an exclusive interview. Guilfoyle said the idea of her taking the job or another press role in the White House has been “raised by a number of people” in the Trump administration, although she declined to go into specifics.

The president rarely surfs the web on his own, but his staff have made a habit of slipping news stories on to his desk — including the occasional internet hoax.

The rumor mill in Washington is working overtime on how long White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer will keep his job as the top spokesman of President Trump’s administration. The White House has been quick to push back against speculation that Spicer may be replaced but continues to battle reports that the president is considering a major staff shakeup and speculation that Trump is dissatisfied with Spicer’s performance.

TV news networks continue to rack up big advertising dollars and viewership versus a year ago, largely due to heavy news viewing — thanks to the scandal-ridden Trump Administration.

In a wide-ranging Twitter rant on Friday morning, President Donald Trump suggested canceling all future press briefings and hinted at the existence of secret “‘tapes’” of his conversations with recently-ousted FBI Director James Comey. He went on to warn Comey against leaks to the media.

Some people would be upset if the president of the United States said they had no talent, but Stephen Colbert was downright giddy about it on Thursday night. The host of CBS’S The Late Show opened Thursday’s broadcast by firing back at President Trump, who said in an interview with Time magazine that Colbert was “a no-talent guy,” “filthy” and not funny.

President Donald Trump says he thinks CNN’s Chris Cuomo looks like a “chained lunatic” on television. CNN’s Don Lemon is “perhaps the dumbest person is broadcasting” and CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert is a “no-talent guy” who talks “filthy.”

The White House Press Pool was kept out of this morning’s Oval Office meeting between President Trump and Russian’s foreign secretary Sergey Lavrov, but the Russian government was there, and it tweeted out pictures of the meeting that the networks used.

A “fake news” graphic superimposed over the faces of news anchors in the Trump commercial was cited by CNN, ABC and NBC for not airing the ad. The networks contend that makes it inaccurate, and ABC said it represents a personal attack.

President Trump on Thursday blasted the media, saying members of the press will do anything to “get attention.” “The Fake News media is officially out of control,” the president tweeted. “They will do or say anything in order to get attention — never been a time like this!”

The CBS latenight host defends his monologue that included a crude sexual reference on the relationship between the presidents of the United States and Russia and has since prompted calls to fire him and boycott Late Show advertisers.

President Trump’s campaign is criticizing CNN for refusing to air an advertisement touting the president’s achievements during his first 100 days in office, saying the network doesn’t want it because the ad “doesn’t fit their narrative.” CNN said it requested that the campaign remove a portion that referred to the mainstream media as fake news.

President Trump cut short a television interview on Saturday after being asked about his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had spied on him, reviving an incendiary charge even as his re-election campaign released its first advertisement taking aim at “fake news.”

President Trump’s campaign apparatus is launching a seven-figure TV ad campaign to tout his achievements in his first 100 days in office, the organization announced today.

He’s not unprecedented. He’s not going to change. And 11 other lessons the media still haven’t learned about the president.