Let's stop the maddness...

Trump suggests AT&T boycott to force changes in CNN coverage

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

President Donald Trump kicked off his state visit to the United Kingdom on Monday with a complaint about CNN, the cable network he loves to hate, urging a boycott of the network’s new corporate owner, AT&T.

As the president traveled to Buckingham Palace in London for lunch with the royal family, Trump fired off a pair of tweets complaining that CNN, whose coverage the president often says is unfair to his administration, "is the primary source of news available from the U.S." in the UK. Trump, known to be a voracious consumer of cable news, wrote that he felt compelled to turn the channel off.

He went on to suggest that the network's parent company, AT&T, "do something" about CNN's coverage and leveled a threat against the company.

“I believe that if people stoped [sic] using or subscribing to @ATT, they would be forced to make big changes at @CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway,” Trump vented in a tweet blasted out to his 60 million followers. “It is so unfair with such bad, Fake News! Why wouldn’t they act. When the World watches @CNN, it gets a false picture of USA. Sad!”

A CNN spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment.

Trump’s apparent attempts to gain leverage over the network's coverage come after he adamantly opposed the deal that allowed him to call for a boycott of AT&T.

AT&T recently acquired Time Warner, the company that owns CNN and its properties, in a deal that Trump vowed to block as a presidential candidate and that the Justice Department fought in court on antitrust grounds until earlier this year. In February, a federal appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling rejecting the Justice Department’s challenge to the merger, allowing it to go forward.

The next month, The New Yorker reported that earlier in his administration, Trump had instructed then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn to pressure the Justice Department into filing suit over the merger, a directive Cohn resisted. The article piqued the attention of House Democrats investigating the president, but the White House in April rebuffed their requests for documents about discussions relating to the merger.