New White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci took to the White House briefing room podium this afternoon, just hours after accepting the new role, and answered questions from the overwhelming majority of the reporters in the room.
One of those questions came from CNN’s Sara Murray, and during his answer, Scaramucci spoke about the false, later retracted CNN report of which he was the subject that eventually led to the resignation of three journalists who were involved with it being published.
MURRAY: In terms of the relationship that this press operation has had with news outlets, they’ve made a habit of calling news outlets they don’t like fake news, calling stories they don’t like fake news, calling errors that were corrected, using that as an excuse to call it fake news. Is that the kind of relationship you want with news outlets?
AdvertisementSCARAMUCCI: I want to speak for myself right now because it’s my first day on the job, I got to get familiar with everybody, get direction from the president but I had a personal incident with your news organization, and I thought I handled it well. You know, you guys said something about me that was totally unfair and untrue. You retracted it and issued me an apology and I accepted the apology immediately so for me, I’ve never been a journalist but I have played a journalist on television. I used to host Wall Street Week and so I have empathy for journalists in terms of sometimes they’re going to get stories wrong, but I don’t like the fake news and if you said to me that there’s some media bias out there, you want me to be as candid as I would like to be with you guys, there feels like there’s a little bit of media bias so what we hope we can do is deescalate that and turn that around and let the message from the president get out there to the American people.”