Trump seizes on ex-NYT editor Jill Abramson’s criticism of paper

President Trump on Saturday seized on comments from former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson to back up his attacks on the newspaper as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.”

Abramson, who served as the Times’s top news editor from 2011 until her firing in 2014, criticizes current executive editor Dean Baquet in her forthcoming book, saying some of the publication’s news articles have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”

{mosads}The president shared her remarks on Saturday morning, writing that “Ms. Abramson is 100% correct.”

“Horrible and totally dishonest reporting on almost everything they write. Hence the term Fake News, Enemy of the People, and Opposition Party!” Trump tweeted.

“Former @NYTimes editor Jill Abramson rips paper’s ‘unmistakably anti-Trump’ bias.”

Ms. Abramson is 100% correct. Horrible and totally dishonest reporting on almost everything they write. Hence the term Fake News, Enemy of the People, and Opposition Party!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2019

Abramson responded to Trump’s tweet Saturday that invoked her comments by telling the president, “I revere @nytimes and praise its tough coverage of you.”

Anyone who reads my book, Merchants of Truth, will find I revere @nytimes and praise its tough coverage of you https://t.co/fHXYiva4hK

— Jill Abramson (@JillAbramson) January 5, 2019

Her book, set for release Feb. 5, examines her former employer’s coverage of the president.

“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson wrote in the book, excerpts of which were released this week.

“Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”

She argues that the Times has been motivated to slant its coverage to be critical of Trump after adding more than 600,000 subscribers during his first six months in office.

“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated,” Abramson wrote.

Abramson argued in her book that the Times’s longtime rival, The Washington Post, is also guilty of mixing opinion stories with unbiased new stories.

Fox News “Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz was the first to report Abramson’s comments.

The president frequently rails against The New York Times and other media outlets. He tweeted or retweeted the phrase “fake news” more than 190 times in 2018.