The New York Times executive editor claimed that President Donald Trump calling his reporters names is putting the employees’ “lives at risk.”
Dean Baquet made the claim in a newly published interview.
“I think his personal attacks on reporters, including Maggie [Haberman], are pretty awful and pretty unpresidential,” Baquet told The Guardian. “I think personal attacks on journalists, when he calls them names, I think he puts their lives at risk.”
“I think that when he actually calls reporters names, says they’re un-American, says they’re enemies of the people … that phrase has a deep history. I think when he says that, it is an appalling attack on the press,” Baquet added.
Trump has repeatedly attacked The New York Times over its stories about him. A number of stories have put forth unsubstantiated claims that were later debunked. The paper has relied heavily on anonymous sources for its reporting on the Trump administration and numerous employees have expressed anti-Trump sentiments on their social media accounts.
Haberman, one of the paper’s top political writers, laughed when told Trump would win the presidency before he beat Hillary Clinton, Trump disclosed in an interview earlier this year, along with former Bill Clinton aide and ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulus. Haberman had a close relationship with Clinton’s campaign, emails published by Wikileaks showed.
In one example, Haberman reported in August that Trump was “frustrated” that his reception at hospitals in Dayton and El Paso during visits following mass shootings didn’t receive better press coverage. She and her coauthors claimed that Trump “screamed at his aides to begin producing proof that in El Paso people were happy to see him.” They also wrote that the president “bellowed at the small coterie of advisers traveling with him.”
The angle relied fully on anonymous sources.
One of the few people quoted on the record was Joe Lockhart, who was a press secretary for former President Bill Clinton. Lockhart said videos showing Trump meeting with shooting victims and their families were “disgusting.”
Trump challenged the story, writing: “Maggie Haberman of the Failing @nytimes reported that I was annoyed by the lack of cameras inside the hospitals in Dayton & El Paso, when in fact I was the one who stated, very strongly, that I didn’t want the Fake News inside & told my people NOT to let them in. Fake reporting!”
