Trump ramps up reporter attacks with White House media bias tracker

President Donald Trump speaks at the White House on Tuesday. Photo / Marvin Joseph, The Washington Post

The White House has launched a page on its website devoted to naming and shaming media outlets and reporters that publish stories it disagrees with.

“Misleading. Biased. Exposed,” the site reads, naming the Boston Globe, CBS News and the Independent as “media offenders of the week” for allegedly misrepresenting President Donald Trump’s call for six Democratic members of Congress to be hanged for a video saying that military personnel should not follow illegal orders.

“The Democrats and Fake News Media subversively implied that President Trump had issued illegal orders to service members,” the site reads. “Every order President Trump has issued has been lawful. It is dangerous for sitting Members of Congress to incite insubordination in the United States’ military, and President Trump called for them to be held accountable.”

It also lists an “Offender Hall of Shame” that features The Washington Post, CBS News, CNN and MSNBC – the former name of the cable network MS NOW. The page shows a database of news articles from these publications and others, the names of the reporters who wrote them and categories of offences, including “bias”, “lie”, and “left wing lunacy”. A leaderboard lists The Post as the top offender. The page also includes a sign-up prompt for a newsletter promising weekly updates on the “truth”.

The White House took issue with at least four Washington Post articles, including a report that the US Coast Guard would no longer classify swastikas and nooses as hate symbols – an action that, as The Post noted, the Coast Guard walked back following The Post’s initial report.

“The Washington Post is proud of its accurate, rigorous journalism,” a Post spokesperson said.

The White House’s new website page is the latest expression of Trump’s criticism of the mainstream media, expressed in ongoing lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, high-profile settlements with ABC and CBS, and a barrage of insults about news organisations he has long called the “enemy of the people”.

In recent weeks, Trump has directed a string of personal insults at female reporters. He responded “Quiet, piggy” to a Bloomberg reporter on November 14 after she asked him a question aboard Air Force One, a comment that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended at a recent press briefing. Days later, he called an ABC reporter “a terrible person and a terrible reporter” and called her network “fake news”. He described a New York Times reporter as “a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out” in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, and called a CBS News reporter “a stupid person” in response to her questions about government vetting of Afghan refugees on Thursday.

Other outlets criticised on the White House website include the Associated Press, ABC News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and, initially, Fox News. The criticism of Fox News was misdirected, a Fox News spokeswoman said, because the website wrongly identified a reporter as being from that outlet. The White House removed the Fox News page after the news outlet raised its objection.

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Trump has made it clear that his issue isn’t with media bias but with “journalists not flattering him and regurgitating his lies”.

“People understand the obvious conflict inherent in a presidential administration appointing itself the arbiter of media bias, and I expect that after the initial wave of publicity, few Americans will be paying attention to this latest stunt,” Stern said. “The gimmick is wearing thin.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

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