Donald Trump will bar the Washington Post from directly covering his campaign charging the newspaper that broke Watergate and considers itself the watchdog of the political class with lying about him.
It is his latest run-in with the American press, which he professes to despise while all along relying on its willingness to cover him almost non-stop to fuel his presidential campaign train.
“Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phoney and dishonest Washington Post,” Mr Trump posted on Facebook.
It appears the mogul and TV ringmaster was newly irritated by an article that appeared earlier on Monday that depicted him insinuating in a Fox interview that somehow President Barack Obama had been complicit in promoting terrorism and therefore the attack in the Pulse night club also.
“Trump seemed to repeatedly accuse President Obama on Monday of identifying with radicalised Muslims who have carried out terrorist attacks in the United States and being complicit in the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando over the weekend, the worst the country has ever seen,” the report started.
The Fox interview turned in part on Mr Trump’s near obsessive pre-occupation with Mr Obama’s failure to call the recent attacks in the US the result of “radical Islamic terrorism”.
“People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can't even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’” he said in the interview with Fox “There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”
Mr Trump regularly directs his most venomous slurs on the press because he knows it delights most of his supporters, calling reporters who are following him “scum “ or worse. Last summer he ejected a leading Spanish-language TV anchor, Jorge Ramos, from a press conference because he'd didn’t like the tone of his questions.
He also initiated a long feud with a Fox present Megyn Kelly for allegedly being to mean to him during the first televised Republican debate in Cleveland last August. When the network picked her to help moderate another debate in Iowa in February, Mr Trump boycotted it.
At a press conference at Trump Tower two weeks ago in New York, he openly called the ABC correspondent covering the event a “sleaze”, a slight that in other countries might have provoked all the press corps to rise up and walk out in solidarity.
“Donald Trump’s decision to revoke The Washington Post’s press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press,“ Marty Baron, the paper’s editor said.
“When coverage doesn’t correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organisation is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along - honourably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We’re proud of our coverage, and we’re going to keep at it.”
