Reporters offended after Sarah Sanders says some are ‘purposefully misleading’

“There’s a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people, something that happens regularly,” she said at the White House briefing.

“You cannot say that it’s an honest mistake when you’re purposefully putting out information that you know to be false, or when you’re taking information that hasn’t been validated, that hasn’t been offered with any credibility and has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance,” she added.

Chris Cillizza of CNN, Trump’s main target in the press, said it’s “beyond offensive” for Sanders to say the press is purposefully not reporting the facts.

“It is beyond offensive for Sarah Sanders to say that journalists are purposely reporting false information to forward some sort of agenda,” he tweeted. “Just appalling.”

Andy Ostroy, a Huffington Post contributor, said reporters should boycott the briefings as a result of Sanders’ comments.

“WH reporters should just get up and walk the f**k out of that briefing,” he tweeted. “How dare @PressSec claim, w/o any evidence whatsoever, that the mainstream media intentionally lies & misleads the public. Grow…some…balls.”

Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg said no one in the press is doing what Sanders accused them of doing.

“‘You cannot say it’s an honest mistake when you’re purposely putting out information you know is false,’ @presssec says, pointing to something that no one does,” Epstein wrote.

MSNBC’s Katy Tur said reporters are routinely held accountable when they “mess up,” and accused the White House of lying “multiple times” without any repercussions.

“The president and this White House have misled the American public multiple times from things as innocuous as crowd size to retweeting misleading videos meant to sow divisions and fuel fear,” she said after the briefing.

David Rutz, managing editor of the Free Beacon, took Ostroy’s idea one step further by saying maybe the White House briefing should be terminated because all the reporters just complain about it afterward.

“The press briefing pattern at this point is: @presssec stonewalls, tells everyone they all get one question because they don’t have much time, then all the reporters go on TV afterwards and say that nothing is fair,” he wrote. “Please ban the White House press briefing.”