US President Donald Trump has cancelled his subscription of the New York Times and the Washington Post, taking his fight with media he deems hostile to a new level.
All federal government agencies are expected to follow.
It was not clear if the cancellation will apply only to print subscriptions or also their digital versions.
The White House sought to portray it as a cost-saving decision, “Not renewing subscriptions across all federal agencies will be a significant cost saving — hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars will be saved,” press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to The Times.
But the President himself told Fox News, his favourite news outlet some of whose hosts enjoy unmatched access to him, in an interview, “We’re going to probably terminate that (the Times) and The Washington Post.”
“They’re fake,” he added, using a word he a pet phrase for denouncing media critical of him; he has also called them the “enemy of the people”..
President Trump likes to call these two publications “failing Times” and the “Amazon Post”, which has the Post pointed out in a report Thursday, were inaccurate. The Times is an immensely profitable company and the Post is owned by Amazon founder and owner Jeff Bezos, but is not affiliated to Amazon, the company.
Neither publication had a comment.
The Times and Post have been at the top of the president’s list of news publication he had deemed hostile to him and his administration, along with CNN, whose Jim Acosta had his White House press credential briefly cancelled, until he went to court and had it restored to him.
The two news publication have collected a bunch of Pulitzers for their investigative stories about Trump, his businesses and Russian interference over the past three years. And the Post has run been running a widely cited “Fact Checker” of his false or misleading claims, which stood at 13,435 in the 993 days he had been officer on October 9, the most recent count.
But Trump is not the first US president to banish a news publication from the White House.
President John F Kennedy stopped the delivery of The New York Herald Tribune in 1962, unhappy with its coverage of him. But the Times reported he could not do without it and aides kept sneaking in “bootlegs” of the publication until the ban was lifted.