Spicer attacks media in new interview

Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer tore into the media on Wednesday, casting the White House press corps as “largely a liberal group of people willing to overlook” the misdeeds and mistakes of Democratic presidents, while unfairly savaging the Trump administration.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Spicer said the media has done poorly at holding journalists to account for incorrect and misleading news coverage.

Spicer took aim at the Post, in particular, saying that a May 10 article that described Spicer huddling with aides near a grouping of bushes on White House grounds after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey was “a lie.”

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“Instead of focusing on the news, you had Jenna Johnson saying, ‘How do I create a fake scene to make something more clickworthy,’ ” Spicer told the Post, referring to the reporter who authored the story. 

The former press secretary also accused The New York Times of publishing a misleading report, in which Spicer was quoted as saying that he regretted berating journalists over the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd in his debut press briefing in January.

“Glenn did a masterful job of taking what I said for his own purposes,” Spicer told the Post, referring to Glenn Thrush, a Times reporter who interviewed him for that story. “He asked if I had any regrets and I said, ‘Yes, of course I do.’ He turned it into, as would be expected, all about the media.”

Spicer, who served as Trump’s first press secretary, resigned in July after the president named Anthony Scaramucci as his White House communications director. 

Scaramucci was fired less than two weeks later, and Spicer was permanently replaced by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who previously served as deputy press secretary. 

In his six-month tenure in the White House, Spicer frequently sparred with the White House press corps and became known for his fiery, contentious press briefings that, for months, were aired daily on television news networks.

But in his interview with the Post on Wednesday, Spicer listed several reporters that he believes have done good work. Among them, Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs and Margaret Talev, Reuters’s Steve Holland, Fox News’s John Roberts, CNBC’s Kayla Tausche and Eamon Javers, NBC News’s Carol Lee and Yahoo’s Hunter Walker.

Asked whether anyone from CNN made his list, Spicer replied bluntly. “Oh, no,” he said.