Attacking media

Trump targets MSNBC, CNN in tweet attacking media

By LOUIS NELSON

President Donald Trump on Thursday morning attacked MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN while heaping praise on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” writing that the MSNBC cable show is “dead” and CNN is “too predictable.”

“Wow, @foxandfriends is blowing away the competition in the morning ratings. Morning Joe is a dead show with very few people watching and sadly, Fake News CNN is also doing poorly. Too much hate and inaccurately reported stories - too predictable!” the president wrote on Twitter.

The president’s love for Fox & Friends, the morning show where he receives almost unflinchingly positive coverage, is likely only matched by his distaste for CNN, the network he often lambasts as “fake news,” and MSNBC, which he is also often sharply critical of. Trump has often saved particular venom for the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who were once close friends of the president but have been deeply critical of him as president.

Trump has previously attacked Scarborough as “Psycho Joe” and “crazy” and has called Brzezinski “dumb as a rock Mika” and suggested that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when they met at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve 2017.

Although he has insisted that he does not have time to watch much TV, the president is widely believed to be a voracious consumer of cable news and especially of Fox News, where coverage of him is much more favorable than on CNN or MSNBC. Trump in particular is known to watch “Fox & Friends” in the morning, often posting to Twitter on subjects minutes after they are covered on the show.