Joshua Roberts/Reuters
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on Sunday confirmed he’d had a meeting with President Trump about the news media—but he offered a drastically different account of how things went. Hours after Trump claimed the two had met at the White House and “spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media,” Sulzberger issued a statement saying he’d actually confronted the president about his “inflammatory language.” “I told the president that I thought his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” he wrote. He went on to say he warned Trump that his “enemy of the people” label and attacks on journalists “are dangerous and harmful to our country.” “I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists” and “is putting lives at risk,” he said.
