Media

Trump attacks Time reporter for mistake about MLK bust

by Jordan Fabian - 01/21/17 4:18 PM ET

President Trump on Saturday attacked a Time magazine journalist for mistakenly reporting that a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.

Trump called out the reporter, Zeke Miller, while speaking to staff at the Central Intelligence Agency, even though Miller quickly acknowledged and corrected the mistake the previous day.

“They said that ‘Donald Trump took down the bust — the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King.’ But it was right there. There was a cameraman that was in front of it,” Trump said, standing in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall honoring the employees who died in the line of duty.

{mosads}“So Zeke, Zeke from Time magazine writes this story about ‘I took down’ — I would never do that because I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King.

“But this is how dishonest the media is,” Trump continued. “Now big story, the retraction was like, where? Was it a line or do they even bother putting it in?”

In fact, the detail was included in a White House pool report about Trump’s first actions in the Oval Office as president.

Miller initially reported the King bust was missing. But minutes later he sent out a correction, saying the bust had been obscured by a door and a Secret Service agent.

He then sent out more than a dozen tweets correcting the mistake and apologizing, including one directed to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who had called it “a reminder of the media danger of tweet first check facts later.”

“This is on me, not my colleagues. I’ve been doing everything I can to fix my error. My apologies,” Miller tweeted at Spicer.

“Apology accepted,” the spokesman tweeted back.