Speaking on behalf of CNN and his reporting, which Meyers said has been “conflated” with BuzzFeed’s, Tapper said he’s been “yelled at” by both presidents and press secretaries before. “But I’ve never seen the effort to delegitimize an organization for a story that you don’t like that has been proven,” he said, noting that “every word of the story that we reported last Tuesday has been proven correct.”
“He was obviously trying to get us to stop focusing on the story and just to discredit all of us, and, you know, that’s too bad,” Tapper said of Trump. “It’s not a huge shock that he would try to do that. It’s one of the reasons that I wasn’t happy about BuzzFeed doing what it did, in addition to the fact that I thought it was irresponsible to put these uncorroborated rumors out there. I mean, that’s not reporting, that’s just publishing.”
Tapper went on to say that the idea that the White House press corps might “work as one unit” to combat the Trump administration is “a little fanciful, because we compete against each other.” But, he added, “if a reporter asks a legitimate question and doesn’t get an answer” and then Trump or his press secretary tries to call on someone else to change the subject, the press corps as a whole shouldn’t let them get away with that.
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