That didn’t take long.
Less than a week after the election, President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday took up his ongoing crusade against journalists with a trio of tweets aimed at The New York Times:
The @nytimes states today that DJT believes "more countries should acquire nuclear weapons." How dishonest are they. I never said this!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the "Trump phenomena"
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change – doubt it?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
Trump was referencing a letter to readers from New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger pledging the newspaper would cover Trump fairly during his White House tenure. The letter did not include an apology.
The broadside against The New York Times comes days after a tweet from Trump saying that protests in the wake of the election were “incited by the media.”
Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2016
In the early-morning hours after Election Day, Trump gave a victory speech defined by gentler rhetoric than he deployed on the campaign trail, fueling hopes that his presidency would be marked by fewer public outbursts against the press and political rivals than his candidacy. These tweets, Trump’s first public remarks on the media since the election, represent a return to his media-bashing ways.
Trump’s anti-press rhetoric reached such heights during the campaign that the Committee to Protect Journalists branded him “an unprecedented threat to the rights of journalists.”
The New York Times on Sunday responded to Trump’s claim that the newspaper is losing “thousands” of subscribers, telling CNN’s Brian Stelter that the Times has seen “a surge” in digital subscriptions since the election.
NYT: "Since Election Day, we have seen a surge in digital subscriptions, three times what is normal." It is crunching the #'s for print now
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 13, 2016
A New York Times spokesperson told Politico that The New York Times has added “six times the normal number of net new digital subscriptions since Election Day.”
