A day after President Donald Trump blew up at ABC News correspondent Mary Bruce and called for the network to lose its broadcast license, the White House amped up its attacks, sending out a press release on claiming that the network is “a Democrat spin operation masquerading as a broadcast network.”
The release runs through a timeline of what the White House claims is “a long, rich tradition of peddling lies, conspiracies, and outright opinion thinly veiled as fact.”
But it underscores Trump’s anger at Bruce for merely asking his guest at the White House, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, about the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She later asked the president about the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Then, Trump chided Bruce for asking a “horrible,” “insubordinate” and “just a terrible question.” Trump said to her, “You’re all psyched up. Somebody psyched you over at ABC and they’re going to psych it. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.”
“I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong, and we have a great commissioner, the chairman, who should look at that.” Trump was referring to his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr.
The network has issued no statement defending Bruce, even though a host of her colleagues and journalism groups have.
On Good Morning America, co-host Robin Roberts alluded to Trump’s blow up as she spoke to Bruce. “Mary, I don’t have to tell you. These are extremely challenging times, and thank you for your reporting and your willingness to ask these types of questions. It must be surreal for you, Mary.”
“It is a little surreal, and Robin, thank you for that, but it is also, just our job,” Bruce said.
“Amen,” Roberts said.
In the press release, the White House cited, among other things, an instance in 2017 when the network suspended Brian Ross for a “serious error” after he reported that Trump directed Michael Flynn, briefly his national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the previous year’s presidential election.
Also mentioned was the incident in June with anchor and correspondent Terry Moran, whose contract was not renewed after he posted on social media that Trump aide Stephen Miller was a “world-class hater.”
Some of the White House citations are over word choices and are countered by fact checks.
The White House claimed that, in a September interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, George Stephanopoulos falsely insisted “that people had somehow ‘died’ because of the Trump Administration’s decision to shutter a bloated, wasteful bureaucratic agency.” The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof has reported on deaths from the abrupt closure of foreign relief agency USAID, while studies warn of millions of deaths through the decade if funding is not restored.
The White House also dinged the network for what it did not cover, including “the Office of National Intelligence’s announcement of a landmark investigation into Obama-era politicization and manufacturing of intelligence assessments.” But sites like Factcheck.org found the report from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “misleading.”
The network and The Walt Disney Co. have grappled with how to respond to Trump, who has threatened to use his regulatory power to go after reporting he doesn’t like or, in the case of Bruce, even questions that displease him.
In December, before Trump returned to office, ABC settled a lawsuit he brought against the network fpr $16 million. Trump sued after Stephanopoulos stated on This Week that “juries have found” the then-former president “liable for rape.” In fact, a jury found Trump was liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
The judge in Carroll’s case, Lewis Kaplan, wrote in a later ruling, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
More recently, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel from the air, hours after Carr, on a podcast, warned the network over comments that the late-night host made about Charlie Kirk.
“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
After a backlash that saw cancellations of Disney+ subscriptions, ABC returned Kimmel to the air the next week.
Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime and columnist for The Washington Post, was murdered at the country’s Turkish consulate in 2018. During Trump’s first term, the CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered his killing.
At the White House on Tuesday, Trump dismissed the Khashoggi murder, telling reporters, “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”
He also scolded Bruce for even bringing the issue up. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” the president said.