Media hostile to Donald Trump, says Raj Shah

Indian American White House official calls media-bashing unfair

Donald Trump’s deputy assistant criticized news media of being hostile to the US President. Indian American Raj Shah said on Monday that the media is attacking President Donald Trump from day one so that he did not get the honeymoon period most news presidents usually do, PTI reported.

Raj Shah, who also serves as the deputy communications director at the White House said that the media is not being “fair and straight”.

“There is a constant effort by the mainstream media to go after this president rather than reporting fair and straight. There’s been a treatment of this president, even from the campaign through the transition into the inauguration and afterwards, that has been hostile. There has been a very tough treatment of the president by the media,” Raj Shah said.

From his very first day in the Oval office, there is a hostile atmosphere between the President and the media. Trump called The New York Times a “failing” newspaper, termed CNN as “Clinton News Network” and denied credentials to The Washington Post.

Trump’s White House team is not satisfied with most of the news reports and in some situations they vowed to fight the media with “tooth and nail” over “unfair attacks”.

On Thursday, the President asked the media, including the Times to apologize to him for “going crazy with conspiracy theories and blind hatred” as they published the news that Trump’s senior aides with his presidential campaign were in contact with Russian officials.

The 32-year-old Shah admitted that it is a great challenge for him deal with these situations.

“As Deputy Communications Director, my job is to help Press Secretary Sean Spicer articulate the President’s message, responding to the news of the day, the events of the day, correcting the media portrayals and narrative, inaccuracies, presenting new information,” Shah said. “It is about synthesizing various elements and putting them together, helping Sean prepare for the briefing, rolling out decisions and actions being taken out by the President.”

“We work through the morning, we discuss the news of the day and how we are going to respond to it, figure out who needs to be looped in, there are policy elements, there are foreign policy elements, relevant players from the policy shops, we gather the information, synthesize it and later in the day at 10 am in another round of the news we figure out,” Shah told PTI about his job in the White House.

“There’s so much is going on around the world. There’s speed and pace with it to which we need to adjust,” he said.

Shah said that the other challenge for him is the Democratic Party.

“I think their (Democrat’s) tactics have been unprecedented, they have been hostile, they have been entirely partisan and they have been trying to squeeze the government at fault in many ways. It undermines the effectiveness of how we can do the work for the American people. I wish the media is willing to – and able to – expose them,” Shah said.

“The focus on changes to the National Security Council, organization of meetings was overblown and missed the mark and did not share the historical context,” he added.