Trump Rails Against the Media and ‘Failing’ NY Times: ‘An Evil Propaganda Machine’ for Dems

President Donald Trump railed against the “evil” New York Times by twisting the contents of a transcript from an internal meeting among the paper’s staff.

The Failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that they are shifting from their Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism Witch Hunt…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2019

It appears Trump is referring to how Slate obtained a recording last week from an internal town hall where Times executive editor Dean Bacquet spoke to employees about the direction of the paper’s coverage. Much of the discussion gravitated around the internal and external strife the Times saw when they recently changed their headline on Trump’s speech regarding the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

Baquet said this during the town hall:

This is a really hard story, newsrooms haven’t confronted one like this since the 1960s. It got trickier after [inaudible] … went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character. We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that.

The Times‘ headline was criticized by those who feel that it was too soft on Trump’s alleged racism and positions regarding gun control. Bacquet has conceded that the original was a “bad headline,” but Slate’s description of the Times’ meeting shows Bacquet grumbling about how people don’t understand the paper’s function in the Trump era.

“They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president,” Baquet said. “And our job is to figure out why, and how, and to hold the administration to account. If you’re independent, that’s what you do.”

The transcript also has a moment where Bacquet acknowledges that the Times was “a little tiny bit flat-footed” with how they adjusted their coverage after the end of Robert Mueller’s investigation. This involved a dispute among the staff about what is the proper way to report on the president’s racist antics.

One last minor note by the way: Trump continues to claim the Times is failing, but their recent, record-setting paid subscriber count says the opposite is true.

[Photo via Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images]