Chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon walks into Trump Tower in New York during the transition period. (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - "I want you to quote this," Trump strategist Stephen Bannon told the New York Times in an interview conducted on Wednesday and published on Thursday. "The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States."



The newspaper quoted Bannon as saying that "the elite media" got the election "dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong." He called it a "humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”



Bannon also noted that the mainstream media, despite getting it wrong, has not fired anyone who covered the Trump campaign: "Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign,” he said, without naming specific reporters.



“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Bannon said.



On Thursday, in a interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity, President Donald Trump was asked about his treatment by the mainstream media:



"Well, they're the liars," Trump said, once again using the size of his inauguration crowd as an example of biased reporting.



The media, much of the media, not all of it, is very, very dishonest. Honestly, it's fake news. It's fake. They make things up."



Trump once again mentioned a false report by a pool reporter that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office. He said the media was trying to make him look like a racist.

Opinion-purveyor Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," suggested on Friday that Trump and his people are deliberately trying to "provoke" the media.

"He (Bannon) said the media should be embarassed and humiliated and keep it's mouth shut and just listen for a while," Scarborough said. "That's not going to happen. And he knows that's not going to happen. And I do just wonder whether this is, again, for effect...to start a fight with the media that obviously breaks in their direction every time they fight the media."

CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday also took exception to Bannon's comment that the media should "keep its mouth shut." "No," Tapper said on Thursday's show, "The Lead."