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By Paul Farhi November 21 at 8:10 PM
President-elect Donald Trump met Monday with television news executives and some well-known TV journalists and
repeatedly told them the campaign reporting about him was “unfair” and “dishonest.”
Participants in the meeting at Trump Tower in New York described it as a contentious but generally respectful gathering.
But if the media elite attended in hopes of improving relations with the forthcoming Trump administration, that wasn’t quite
in the cards. The president-elect specifically called out reporting by CNN and NBC that he deemed unfair, according to four
people who attended the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was off the record.
(The ground rules prevented the networks from reporting the very story they were part of.)
The group included some of the top news media figures that Trump had aimed barbs at during the campaign, including “Meet
the Press” anchor Chuck Todd; ABC News anchors George Stephanopoulos and David Muir; CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Erin
Burnett; ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz; “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt; and a CBS News contingent that
included Norah O’Donnell, Charlie Rose, John Dickerson and Gayle King.
Among the network news executives present were CNN Worldwide Chairman Jeff Zucker, NBC News President Deborah
Turness, MSNBC President Phil Griffin, ABC News President James Goldston, and the four top executives from Fox News, Bill
Shine, Jack Abernethy, Jay Wallace and Suzanne Scott.
Trump was joined by his newly appointed chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus,
and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top adviser.
The meeting didn’t include representatives of newspaper, radio or online-news organizations, although Trump has scheduled
two meetings with the publisher and journalists from the New York Times on Tuesday, including one on-the-record session.
Instead of striking a harmonious tone to build rapport following the election, Trump was combative, participants said. In a
calm and deliberate voice, he told the group sitting around a conference table that they had failed to provide their viewers with
fair and accurate coverage, and told them they failed to understand him or his appeal to millions of Americans.
Trump showed no love for the media during the long campaign, calling reporters the “lowest form of humanity.” And on
Monday he repeatedly used the words “unfair” and “dishonest” to describe the coverage, participants said.
But he made no mention of the enormous amount of airtime that the networks, especially on cable, devoted to his campaign. A
number of analyses have noted that Trump’s presidential effort was boosted by the news media’s fascination with him.
Trump directed particular ire at CNN and several reporters at other cable networks whom he sees as unreasonably
antagonistic toward him, though he did not mention them by name. He also referenced both NBC News reporter Katy Tur and
ABC’s Raddatz without using their names.
The thrust of his critique of Raddatz involved her alleged emotional reaction on election night while she discussed the
implications of a Trump presidency on the U.S. military (ABC has strongly disputed reports that Raddatz choked up on air,
calling such stories “ridiculous and untrue”).
One participant asked Trump for his definition of “fair,” noting that part of the news media’s job is to critically examine a
candidate’s words and background. Trump replied that his definition was “truth.”
The participants variously described Trump as “combative,” “proud,” and “dismissive” toward the news organizations present.
He also shrugged off the need for a constant pool covering him, the people said, though he did not delve into specifics. Trump
has repeatedly shirked his pool, upending a long-standing tradition of the president and president-elect.
