US President Donald Trump has been watching CNN “days and nights,” despite his repeated attacks against the news network in public, says CNN’s president.
"He claims that CNN is unwatchable, but the only way he knows that is because he's watching it obsessively. We know that he spends his days and nights watching CNN," Jeff Zucker said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) on Thursday.
The president of CNN also expressed regret over giving Trump too much coverage during and after the 2016 US presidential election campaign while ignoring other candidates in the field and said that CNN probably would not have focused so much on the New York real estate mogul if given the opportunity to do it again.
"If we could go back, we probably wouldn't cover as many Trump rallies live as we did. We didn't cover any more than Fox News or MSNBC; I think the only difference is that we've acknowledged we probably took too many of them," he noted.
Zucker (pictured below) made the comments as his news network has long been targeted by the new US president for being biased against him both during his presidential campaign and since his election victory.
Trump has not appeared on a CNN program since August last year.
Trump’s frustration with CNN was clearly visible during a press conference in mid-January at the Trump Tower in New York City, where he refused to take questions from a CNN correspondent, blasting the news network for spreading “fake news.”
The businessman-turned-president has also recently rebuked some US media, calling the news organizations the "enemy of the American people.”
"The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" Trump said in a tweet on February 17.
Describing the political press as “dishonest” and “fake news,” Trump has repeatedly accused them of being deceitful, saying "The press has become so dishonest that if we don't talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people, the public doesn’t believe you people anymore."
Historians have pointed out similarities between Trump and former US President Richard Nixon, who in 1972 told his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, “The press is the enemy.”
Posts
