The press secretary for US President Donald Trump Karoline Leavitt said that a new section has appeared on the official White House website, where the administration publishes materials about bias and "fake news" in American and foreign media. The section lists media outlets that the administration believes are spreading misleading information.
On the website, they placed a section called "Media Malefactor of the Week", which this time includes the Boston Globe, CBS News and the Independent. The complaints relate to coverage of the conflict surrounding six Democratic lawmakers who published a video calling on military personnel not to carry out unlawful orders. In response, Trump accused them of "incitement to insurrection, punishable by death", and reposted the statement with the words: "Hang them".
The aforementioned media outlets reported on this incident, after which the White House accused them of distorting the facts. The website states that "Democrats and the fake news media provocatively insinuated that President Trump was giving unlawful orders to military personnel".
The full list of organisations mentioned in the section for various news stories includes major television channels and publications: ABC News, Associated Press, Axios, BBC, CBS News, CNN, Los Angeles Times, Politico, The Hill, The Independent, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today and others.
The launch of the new section on the White House website marks another escalation in Donald Trump's confrontation with the media. According to The Guardian, the escalation came against the backdrop of lawsuits filed by the president's team against The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, as well as after reaching settlements with the ABC and CBS television networks.
Trump has previously repeatedly stated that major news outlets are "enemies of the people". This, in turn, drew criticism from human rights organisations and media associations.
Alongside the launch of the "wall of shame", the president intensified personal attacks on journalists. According to reporters who were on board Air Force One, early this month Trump called a Bloomberg News staffer a "pig" during an altercation that arose after a question about documents related to the case of Jeffrey Epstein.
A few days later, while answering questions from an ABC News journalist about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Epstein scandal, Trump called the reporter a "terrible person".
More recently, in a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that a New York Times correspondent is a "third-rate journalist, ugly both inside and out". It is reported that the post appeared after the journalist co-authored a piece suggesting that, at the age of 80, the president is "losing energy".