White House Says It Will Cancel New York Times, Washington Post Subscriptions

Hours before the decision was reported, Fox News aired an interview in which Trump railed against the papers as "fake."
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The White House said it’s canceling its subscriptions to two of President Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags ― The New York Times and The Washington Post ― after he bashed the papers in an interview with Fox NewsSean Hannity.

Press secretary Stephanie Grisham confirmed to Politico on Tuesday that neither subscription will be renewed.

The night before, Fox aired Hannity’s interview with the president during which Trump labeled the Times “a fake newspaper,” griping that “we don’t even want it in the White House anymore.”

“We’re going to probably terminate that and The Washington Post,” he added. “They’re fake.”

The Post declined to comment on the matter. The Times and the White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.

Trump has notoriously lashed out against the papers, at times prompting its editors to release statements condemning his attacks.

Last month, the president floated the idea of barring Post reporters Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker from the White House, calling them “nasty lightweight reporters” in a fit of rage over their coverage of his administration.

Executive Editor Marty Baron used the occasion to speak out against Trump’s statements, emphasizing that they fit “into a pattern of seeking to denigrate and intimidate the press.”

“It’s unwarranted and dangerous, and it represents a threat to a free press in this country,” he said.

In a similar move, the Times hit back against Trump’s smears of its reporting over the summer when it helped to expose nightmarish conditions in migrant detention centers near the southern border.

While the president often spars with the media, he does pay attention to it when he’s the subject.

“Trump’s desk is piled high with magazines, nearly all of them with himself on their covers,” Washington Post journalist Marc Fisher wrote in 2016 before the election, noting that “each morning, he reviews a pile of printouts of news articles about himself that his secretary delivers to his desk.”

Trump is not known to have made the leap to digital news.

In July, Politico cited current and former White House officials who said that the president receives four newspapers a day, two of which are the Times and the Post.

A source close to the White House told Politico that while Trump is a fan of neither paper, “he never misses a day reading them.”

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