world

Updated: Dec 10, 2017 22:06 IST

In his continuing battle with news media, President Donald Trump on Saturday demanded and got an apology from a Washington Post reporter for a picture he had tweeted, showing empty stands at a rally the president addressed in Florida, but went on to press for him to be fired.

The Washington Post reporter “just admitted that his picture was a FAKE (fraud?) showing an almost empty arena last night for my speech in Pensacola when, in fact, he knew the arena was packed (as shown also on TV). FAKE NEWS, he should be fired,” Trump, who is specially sensitive about crowd sizes at his rallies, tweeted.

When wronged, Trump tends to press for sever punishment. When CNN withdrew a story that alleged the Trump’s son, Donald Trump Junior, had received advance notice of Wikileaks’s dump of hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, the president said in a celebratory Tweet, “Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”

CNN had not punished anyone yet, but ABC News suspended a reporter who had wrongly written that ex-NSA Michel Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump had personally, before assuming office, directed him to establish contact with Russians. Trump congratulated the network over the suspension then. But demanded Sunday that the reporter “should be immediately fired for his ‘mistake’”.