Trump unveils Fake News list

Washington: President Trump - who gleefully questioned President Barack Obama's birthplace for years without evidence - wanted to have a word with the American public about accuracy in reporting.

On Wednesday, after weeks of shifting deadlines, and cryptic clues, Trump released his long-promised "Fake News Awards", an anti-media project that had alarmed advocates of press freedom and heartened his political base.

"And the FAKE NEWS winners are ...," he wrote on Twitter at 8pm.

The message linked, at first, to a malfunctioning page on GOP.com, the Republican National Committee website. An error screen read: "The site is temporarily offline, we are working to bring it back up. Please try back later."

When the page came back online less than an hour later, it resembled a Republican Party news release. Headlined "The Highly Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards" and attributed to "Team GOP", it included a list of Trump administration accomplishments and jabs at news organisations presented in the form of an 11-point list.

The "winners" were CNN, mentioned four times; The New York Times, with two mentions; and ABC, The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek, with one mention apiece.

Taken as a whole, Trump's examples of grievances came as no surprise to anyone who has read his complaints about the media on Twitter.

The various reports singled out by Trump touched on serious issues, like the media's handling of the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia, and frivolous matters, like the manner in which journalists conveyed how the President fed fish during a stop at a koi pond on his visit to Japan.

The first item on the list referred not to a news article but to a short opinion piece posted on The Times's website at 12.42 (local time) on the night Trump became President: "The New York Times's Paul Krugman claimed on the day of President Trump's historic, landslide victory that the economy will 'never' recover," the entry read.

What Krugman actually wrote was this: "If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never." Krugman concluded his election night take by predicting that a global recession was likely, while adding the caveat, "I suppose we could get lucky somehow."

Three days later, Krugman retracted his prediction of an economic collapse, saying he overreacted.

New York Times News Service