美国国家公共电台 NPR Feeling Burned By The Media, Trump Turns Up The Heat（在线收听）

Feeling Burned By The Media, Trump Turns Up The Heat

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It's everywhere you look. Multiple news outlets are reporting that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump groped and forced himself on women. Now Trump has launched a war on the media.

(SOUNDBITE OF CAMPAIGN RALLY)

DONALD TRUMP: The corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They're a political special interest, no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda. And the agenda is not for you. It's for themselves.

CORNISH: That's Trump speaking in Florida today. He has denied the women's allegations, and he's threatened to sue The New York Times, which published some of their stories. NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us now from our studios in New York. And, David, how seriously should one take Donald Trump's threat to sue The Times? And how has the paper responded?

DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Well, it's not the first time Donald Trump has threatened to sue The Times or to sue other news organizations, even in the course of this campaign. I think he last threatened to sue The Times a month ago when The Times revealed ways in which Trump could have legally avoided close to a billion dollars in taxes - a - an assertion that Trump seemed to validate during the most recent debate town hall when he said, yes, I did.

Trump said he was going to sue The Times. In this case, the paper said, look, you're saying we libeled you. Nothing that we said about these women's accusations in any way can tarnish your reputation more than your own past public statements have done. And it said, furthermore, it would have been a disservice - and I'm quoting here from the letter from the lawyer David McCraw. It would have been a disservice not just to our readers, but to democracy itself to silence their voices - speaking about the accusers. This was newsworthy information, he continues, about a subject of deep public concern. So they're standing by their story.

CORNISH: And we should say this isn't just about The Times at this point. Other news outlets have published similar stories of women saying he forcibly kissed them, groped them and other inappropriate behavior. Are those outlets hearing from Trump, as well?

FOLKENFLIK: Well, apparently a campaign official spoke to a couple of news outlets, saying the Palm Beach Post might similarly face certain kinds of legal repercussions - a lawsuit. They might not have had the same deep pockets that The Times has. And he went out of his way to denigrate a woman who's a reporter from People magazine who gave a personal account of having Trump try to force himself upon her before she did a joint interview with Trump and his wife Melania. He basically denigrated her looks and said that he wouldn't effectively have forced himself upon a woman like that.

CORNISH: Now, Donald Trump has news executives at his side in Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, Roger Ailes, the former chairman of "Fox News." So how is the campaign going forward trying to counter this scandal?

FOLKENFLIK: Well, you've seen - you know, this has been this dynamic. He has been attacking the press rhetorically at all kinds of rallies for months. And yet there's always been a rich irony behind those attacks, which is that his candidacy was very much propelled by the consistent amount of coverage his rallies got on particularly cable news broadcast television, but also the number of interviews he did time and again. He has been made a celebrity by as the executive in charge of beauty pageants, but also as a celebrity reality show star, and turned to as a pundit on all these shows, given so much coverage over the months.

So he's did these sort of winking attacks on the press. I don't think it's winking at all anymore. I think he is lashing out at almost anything that's coming in his range of sight, really at these media outlets which have given him so much attention. And he's turned to sort of the safe space of "Fox News" itself - coordinated things with Breitbart News, bringing accusers of Bill Clinton's behavior forward, both before the town hall on Sunday and more recently in certain other interviews and turning to Sean Hannity, in particular, a figure who has been previously a sympathetic figure at Fox toward Trump and now really seems to be part of the Trump campaign, who happens to have a primetime show on "Fox News." He's going to spend time with those same accusers of Bill Clinton later tonight.

CORNISH: That's NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik. David, thank you.

FOLKENFLIK: You bet.