Sean Spicer returns to White House role, immediately lets loose on media

  • 31/05/2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer has completed his first media briefing in more than a fortnight - and he wasted no time resuming his fractious relationship with the media.

Mr Spicer, who has garnered a reputation for delivering frosty responses to questions from the press corps, came back to his role in typically belligerent fashion - blasting a BBC journalist for a false tweet about US President Donald Trump.

While fielding a question about whether Mr Trump was pleased with his administration's messaging - the part of the job Mr Spicer is responsible for - he retorted by bringing the media into disrepute.

"He's very pleased with the work of his staff - I think that he is frustrated, like I and so many others, to see stories that are patently false, to see narratives that are wrong, to see fake news," he said.

"When you see stories get perpetrated that are absolutely false, that are not based in fact - that is troubling, and he's rightly concerned."

When asked to give an example of the fake news he was referring to, Mr Spicer offered up a tweet by BBC diplomatic correspondent James Landale, who posted on Saturday inferring Mr Trump had not bothered to put on headphones that would translate Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni's speech into English at the G7 Summit.

That was later proved to be inaccurate, with Mr Spicer explaining via Twitter that the President wears an earpiece in his right ear for translations - the ear that could not be seen in the clip shared.

When several reporters at the briefing suggested that it was just one tweet and that sometimes journalists make mistakes, Mr Spicer pushed back, saying "no, that's just fake".

"When you see instances like that get perpetrated over and over again, that is frustrating," he said, before getting cut off by a journalist suggesting that the inaccurate tweet was "not that big" a deal.

"Well, thank you, I appreciate it, you get to decide what is big and what is not," Mr Spicer said sarcastically.

"A lot of this stuff that has been pushed out based on unnamed, unaccountable sources - that is very troubling."

The remarks come just hours after Mr Trump labelled Germany as "very bad for [the] US" in a tweet.

Newshub.