Michael Grynbaum

President Donald Trump repeated a pledge to change the nation’s libel laws in a way that would make it easier for people to sue news organizations and publishers for defamation, another salvo from a president who has expressed hostility toward longstanding press freedoms. “We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” President Trump said. Expanding on the theme, he added, “Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not rep

President Donald Trump attacked CNN International hours after President Vladimir Putin signed a law that requires certain American media outlets working in Russia to register with the government as foreign agents, essentially identifying them as hostile entities. Putin’s allies had previously signaled that CNN International could be affected. For now, CNN appears untouched by the new regulations in Russia.

During a private meeting in February with former-FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump floated a proposal that, even by the standards of a leader who routinely advertises his disdain for the news media, brought editors and reporters up short. You should consider, President Trump told Comey, jailing journalists who publish classified information. Presidents are rarely afraid to wrangle and bully reporters, and Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, was pilloried by news organizations for aggressively prosecuting leakers. But Trump’s suggestion breached new territory for political reporters who already consider their profession under siege. “Suggesting that the government should prosecute journalists for the publication of classified information is very menacing, and I think that’s exactly what they intend,” said Martin Baron, The Washington Post’s executive editor. “It’s an act of intimidation.” While Trump’s proposal to Comey could be construed as a private fit of pique, journalists and press freedom groups said that they were alarmed by the possibility that he considered, even casually, enlisting the Justice Department to quash reporting he disliked.

As the White House reeled on May 16 from a chaotic 24 hours, bookended by a pair of bombshell scoops raising serious questions about President Trump’s comportment in the Oval Office, the administration and its surrogates quickly settled on a blunt message: Blame the press.

Doing battle with journalists has become a frequent tactic of the Trump White House. But the conflict has been heightened this week, as aides to the president — and their supporters in the right-wing press — seek to shift focus onto questions about the use of confidential sources and the credibility of the news media, and away from concerns about Trump’s behavior.

The nation’s political divide has been on full display in the news media in the hours since FBI Director James Comey’s abrupt ejection from his post May 9 — and the lines are brighter than ever.

On CNN, the legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin was in full-on meltdown mode, denouncing President Trump’s firing as “a grotesque abuse of power” and “the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.” Over on Fox News, the mood was more sanguine — even celebratory. “This was overdue, and everyone in Washington knows that,” Tucker Carlson declared at the top of his 8 pm broadcast, before introducing a series of guests who echoed his excitement.By May 10, the left-leaning HuffPost featured a one-word, all-capital headline: “Nixonian.” The right-leaning Breitbart News approvingly declared President Trump’s move “the latest in a political outsider’s crusade against entrenched Washington.”

Public radio and television broadcasters are girding for battle after the Trump administration proposed a drastic cutback that they have long dreaded: the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The potential elimination of about $445 million in annual funding, which helps local TV and radio stations subscribe to NPR and Public Broadcasting Service programming, could be devastating for affiliates in smaller markets that already operate on a shoestring budget. Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s president, warned in a statement on Thursday that the Trump budget proposal, if enacted, could cause “the collapse of the public media system itself.”

But the power players in public broadcasting — big-city staples like WNYC in New York City — would be well-equipped to weather any cuts. Major stations typically receive only a sliver of their annual budget from the federal government, thanks to listener contributions and corporate underwriters. Podcasts and other digital offshoots have also become significant sources of revenue. Rural affiliates, however, rely more heavily on congressional largess, which can make up as much as 35 percent of their budgets. Mark Vogelzang, president of Maine Public, called the Trump proposal “the most serious threat to our federal funding” since he started in public broadcasting 37 years ago.

All presidents lunch with major news anchors. But a recent White House gathering was different. The President kept his guests 30 minutes beyond the allotted hour, was gracious and spoke so much that he left his lunch untouched — a recognition, those close to him say, that he must sell himself to the Washington news media because he believes the people who work for him cannot. President Trump, after all, had conceded only the day before on national television that “in terms of messaging, I would give myself a C or a C-plus.” In the same interview, on “Fox & Friends,” the President described his press secretary, Sean Spicer, as “a fine human being.” The language struck close Trump associates as a dismissive turn from a man who relishes hyperbole.

Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime friend of President Trump, said that the President was experiencing “a lot of angst” about his negative coverage. A master media manipulator and storyteller, candidate Trump went without a traditional press secretary during the presidential campaign, preferring to field queries on his own. Now he is increasingly taking command of his administration’s message making, and privately expressing frustration with a White House press office under siege amid leaks and infighting.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of low-road, New York Post-style gossip: “Page Six reporter.” Whether the New England-bred spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip.

He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, President Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

Journalists from The New York Times and several other news organizations were prohibited from attending a briefing by President Donald Trump’s press secretary on Feb 24, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps. Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times and Politico were not allowed to enter the West Wing office of the press secretary, Sean M. Spicer, for the scheduled briefing. Aides to Spicer only allowed in reporters from a handpicked group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed. Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Fox News also attended. Reporters from Time magazine and The Associated Press, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions.

“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.” The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the press corps, quickly rebuked the White House’s actions.

President Donald Trump, in an extraordinary rebuke of the nation’s press organizations, wrote on Twitter on Feb 17 that the nation’s news media “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.” Even by the standards of a president who routinely castigates journalists, President Trump’s tweet was a striking escalation in his attacks on the news media.

At 4:32 p.m., shortly after arriving at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach (FL), President Trump took to Twitter to write: "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!" That message was swiftly deleted, but not before being seen by thousands of social media users. Sixteen minutes later, President Trump posted a revised version of the tweet. Restricted to 140 characters, the president removed the word “sick,” and added two other television networks to his list of offending news organizations, ABC and CBS.