NEW YORK—Reporters at The New York Times tweeted details from a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump as it happened on Tuesday, contrasting it with an off-the-record session Trump held a day earlier with leaders at the top television networks.
Reporters Maggie Haberman and Mike Grynbaum sent a steady stream of Twitter quotes from Trump on his decision not to pursue a case against former opponent Hillary Clinton about her private email server, and potential conflicts between his business and upcoming job in government.
The off-again, on-again Times meeting came as questions swirled about how forthright Trump will be with the media and, by extension, his soon-to-be constituents. He hasn’t held a news conference since his election and on Tuesday sent out a video news release about some of his plans upon taking office.
His meeting with television executives and anchors Monday triggered reports that he criticized them about campaign coverage.
Trump’s meeting at the Times headquarters, announced Monday, was briefly cancelled early Tuesday as the president-elect tweeted that the “terms and conditions” had been changed at the last minute. “Not nice,” tweeted Trump.
The Times said Trump’s team had tried make the meeting off-the-record, meaning details could not be reported, but the newspaper refused. A few hours later, the meeting was back on, and Trump had a private meeting with the Times’ publisher before the session with the publisher, editors and reporters.
The Times said that before the give-and-take on issues, the president-elect complained about some of the newspaper’s coverage of him, saying “I think I’ve been treated very rough.”
A day earlier, Trump reportedly had harsh words with television news division leaders at a Trump Tower meeting, including complaints about a picture NBC used of him where he had a double chin and singling out CNN’s campaign coverage. Besides news executives like CNN’s Jeff Zucker, Fox News’ Bill Shine and MSNBC’s Phil Griffin, the meeting included on-air personalities like ABC’s David Muir, CBS' Charlie Rose and NBC’s Lester Holt.
Even though Trump aide Kellyanne Conway briefly talked to reporters about the meeting afterward, media participants were constrained from talking publicly about it.
“The symbolism was powerful and all wrong for them,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and a journalism professor at George Washington University. “For these powerful people to be marched to the tower of Trump to get their heads cut off—figuratively speaking—is not the positive imagery they could have hoped for.”
