After four months, what many feared would be a hostile relationship between Trump and the media has become something more complex – and dangerous

The press secretary ducking among hedges. Russian journalists sneaking through the Oval Office. A flood of White House leaks. A reporter arrested for asking questions. And a president enraged that his communications team can’t make it all go away.

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What many journalists feared would be a uniquely hostile relationship between Donald Trump and the media has emerged, four months in, as something more complex, slapstick and perhaps dangerous.

On one hand, media access has never been better, with a strangely lonely and needy president inviting journalists on a tour of his living quarters and routinely granting lengthy interviews, including to organizations he claims to hate.

On the other hand, Trump has threatened to criminalize journalism. In certain instances – such as the arrest on Wednesday in West Virginia of a reporter trying to question health secretary Tom Price – that threat has shown its teeth.

Not until the firing of FBI director James Comey this week, however, has the truly vexed nature of the Trump administration’s relationship with the media been laid bare. As the White House press team scrambled to explain events, the West Wing exploded with leaks contradicting the official version or versions of the story. Russian journalists popped up inside an Oval Office meeting from which US journalists had been excluded. And presidential spokesman Sean Spicer sought to clarify whether he hid from reporters “in” bushes or merely “among” them.

The leaks in the Comey affair continued to grow on Thursday night, with one high-placed source dishing the New York Times a description of a tense January dinner between Trump and Comey – from the perspective of Comey himself. The former FBI director says Trump demanded personal loyalty from him, which Comey declined to give, according to the source.

That was after leaks had described a scene of chaos inside the Trump administration as the communications team struggled to settle on an explanation for why the president had fired the FBI director – an effort completely wasted when the president contradicted them all.

Leaks on hour, every hour, will destroy Trump presidency. There’s a Trojan horse plotting within the inner circle! Matt Drudge

“It’s insane,” one White House official told Axios. “The whole thing is just insane.”

Such leaks led Matt Drudge, the conservative wizard and webmaster, to make one of his creeping forays on to Twitter, where he occasionally posts messages for more than half a million followers, only to delete them soon after.

“Trump advisers leaking to media are now deliberately sabotaging presidency,” Drudge lectured. “Major house cleaning needed for survival … Leaks on hour, every hour, will destroy Trump presidency. There’s a Trojan horse plotting within the inner circle!”

Drudge’s warnings echoed the president, who has used his own Twitter account to rant about leaks to the media, decry “fake news,” and threaten new libel laws. Elsewhere he has branded reporters as “enemies of the American people”. On Friday morning, he defended a lack of “perfect accuracy” in the communication of his positions by surrogates and spokesmen, and wondered whether he should “hand out written responses” rather than hold press briefings.

Trump’s rhetoric has a chilling effect on the work of journalists at home and abroad, said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“I think that journalists here find that offensive, they find it chilling, but they’re able to do their jobs,” Simon said. “Where that’s really damaging is in terms of the US global standing and its influence around the world as a defender of press freedom and those values. Because it’s normalizing a kind of rhetoric about the media and its role that you really don’t see from leaders of democratic countries. You see that kind of rhetoric from autocratic leaders. And Trump has met with a couple of them.

There’s no doubt … that kind of language emboldens autocratic leaders to restrict the press in their own countries Joel Simon, CPJ executive director

“There’s no doubt in my mind that that kind of language emboldens autocratic leaders to restrict the press in their own countries.”

If journalism has gotten more difficult and dangerous around the world under Trump, the working environment in the US has for some foreign journalists proven remarkably friendly.

Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times on Thursday carried front-page photographs distributed exclusively by the Russian state news agency TASS, of an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Russian diplomats. American reporters had been barred from the meeting. The White House later said it had been “tricked” into admitting a Russian photographer.

“That’s the problem with the Russians – they lie,” CNN quoted an unnamed White House official as saying.

“No kidding!” gibed Susan Rice, a former Barack Obama national security adviser, on Twitter.

Trump has not, so far, managed to criminally prosecute leaks with the efficacy of the Obama administration, which brought charges against an unprecedented number of journalists and sources.

In regularly recurring incidents, however, journalists have been hit with aggressive criminal charges, including reporters covering the inauguration and reporters covering the Standing Rock showdown.

Spicer huddled with his staff among bushes near television sets on the White House grounds, not ‘in the bushes’ Washington Post editor's note

The latest incident came on Tuesday, when West Virginia journalist Daniel Ralph Heyman was arrested and charged with “willful disruption of governmental processes” for yelling a question about pre-existing conditions at health secretary Price, who was trying to ignore him.

“I’m not sure why, but at some point, I think they decided I was just too persistent in asking this question and trying to do my job and so they arrested me,” Heyman said. The American Civil Liberties Union and other watchdogs warned that the arrest was an attack on press freedom.

As treacherous for journalists as it would be if Trump’s justice department begins to follow through on the president’s promise to criminalize the media, the tension between the two sides has occasionally resolved in scenes more dippy than desperate. These scenes seem usually to feature Spicer, the press secretary.

On Tuesday night, with the news of Comey’s firing breaking, Spicer topped himself by spending “several minutes hidden in the darkness and among the bushes”, as the Washington Post described it. Spicer emerged when the media agreed to turn off their cameras and extinguish their lights.

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The report was later strongly contested by the White House, which prized from the Post an editor’s note explaining that “Spicer huddled with his staff among bushes near television sets on the White House grounds, not ‘in the bushes’, as the story originally stated”.

Spicer issued a further clarification late on Thursday, saying the Post had “falsely described the situation” and “grossly misstated the situation around our attempt to brief the press”.



To settle the matter, Politico called on an unnamed source:

“A person familiar with the press secretary’s location late Tuesday night said Spicer was standing between or behind bushes, but not physically in a bush.”