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Trump Cancels Meeting With New York Times — and Conflicting Versions Surface About Why It Happened

Nov 22, 2016  •  Post A Comment

UPDATE at 6:07 pm (PT) on 11-22-16: This afternoon president-elect Donald Trump, after further conversations with The New York Times, changed his mind and uncancelled his meeting with the newspaper. After the meeting the Times published a story about the encounter, which reads in part:

“…[A]fter a lunchtime interview with editors and reporters for The Times — one that was briefly canceled, after Mr. Trump quarreled over the ground rules, then restored — the mood of the president-elect, it seemed, had mellowed.

“ ‘The Times is a great, great American jewel,’ Mr. Trump declared as he prepared to leave the gathering in the newspaper’s 16th-floor boardroom, where portraits of former presidents adorn the walls.

“ ‘A world jewel,’ added Mr. Trump, who was seated next to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher. ‘And I hope we can all get along.’”

Here is the item we published this morning:

President-elect Donald Trump’s rocky relationship with the press continued today when Trump lashed out at The New York Times after backing out of a planned sitdown with the paper.

The New York Post reports that Trump tweeted about the incident, writing: “I cancelled today’s meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice.”

He followed with a tweet that read: “Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes. In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!”

He wasn’t finished reaming the publication. A third tweet from Trump said: “The failing @nytimes just announced that complaints about them are at a 15 year high. I can fully understand that — but why announce?”

The Times issued a statement today saying: “We were unaware that the meeting was cancelled until we saw the President Elect’s tweet this morning. We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to.”

The Times’ statement adds: “They tried to yesterday — asking for only a private meeting and no on-the-record segment, which we refused to agree to. In the end, we concluded with them that we would go back to the original plan of a small off the record session and a larger on the record session with reporters and columnists.”

Throughout his presidential campaign Trump often attacked the Times.

Trump’s clash with The Times came one day after a rancorous meeting between the president-elect and representatives of top TV news operations, as we reported previously.

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