SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — White House Deputy Communications Director Raj Shah criticized the news media for being hostile towards President Trump. Trump has been subject to constant attacks since his first day on the job. Shah said the media is not being “fair and straight” with their coverage of Trump’s administration.
“There is a constant effort by the mainstream media to go after this president rather than reporting fair and straight,” he said. “There’s been a treatment of this president, even from the campaign through the transition into the inauguration and afterwards, that has been hostile. There has been a very tough treatment of the president by the media.”
Since he stepped into the Oval Office as the commander in chief, President Trump has had a tiff with the American media. Trump called The New York Times a “failing” newspaper, termed CNN as “Clinton News Network” and denied credentials to The Washington Post.
The president’s White House team has not been satisfied with the reporting that’s been coming out of the building, and vowed to fight the media “tooth and nail” over the “unfair attacks.” Thursday, President Trump asked the media, including The New York Times, to apologize to him for “going crazy with conspiracy theories and blind hatred” as they published the news that Trump’s senior aides with his presidential campaign were in contact with Russian officials.
Shah admitted dealing with these stories has made his job much more difficult.
“As Deputy Communications Director, my job is to help Press Secretary Sean Spicer articulate the President’s message, responding to the news of the day, the events of the day, correcting the media portrayals and narrative, inaccuracies, presenting new information,” Shah said. “It is about synthesizing various elements and putting them together, helping Sean prepare for the briefing, rolling out decisions and actions being taken out by the President.
“We work through the morning, we discuss the news of the day and how we are going to respond to it, figure out who needs to be looped in, there are policy elements, there are foreign policy elements, relevant players from the policy shops, we gather the information, synthesize it and later in the day at 10 am in another round of the news we figure out.”
The other challenge for Shah? The Democratic party.
“I think their (Democrat’s) tactics have been unprecedented, they have been hostile, they have been entirely partisan and they have been trying to squeeze the government at fault in many ways. It undermines the effectiveness of how we can do the work for the American people. I wish the media is willing to – and able to – expose them,” he said.
“The focus on changes to the National Security Council, organization of meetings was overblown and missed the mark and did not share the historical context.”
