White House spokesperson, reporters spar over 'erroneous' news coverage

WASHINGTON: White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders today sparred with reporters over errors made by media outlets in recent stories on President Donald Trump as she suggested news organisations to hold "certain level of responsibility in the process." Sanders, in particular, had a fiery exchange with CNN's Jim Acosta who said that journalists make "honest mistake" and that does not make them "fake news." "There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people, something that happens regularly," Sanders told reporters at her daily news conference.

"You can't say that it's an honest mistake when you're purposely 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 any credibility and that has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance," she asserted.

Sanders said she was speaking about the number of reports that have taken place over the last couple of weeks.

"I'm simply stating that there should be a certain level of responsibility in that process," she said.

The White House Press Secretary was asked to cite a specific story that she say is intentionally false, that was intentionally put out there to mislead the American people.

"Sure, the ABC report by Brian Ross. I think that was pretty misleading to the American people and I think that it's very telling that that individual had to be suspended because of that reporting. I think that shows that the network took it seriously and recognised that it was a problem," Sanders responded.

When Playboy's White House correspondent Brian Karem tried to interject, he was shut down.

"I'm not finished," she said.

Acosta wanted to ask more questions on the same issue, but Sarah moved on to other reporters in the room.

On Friday, CNN reported that Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., had received access to hacked Democratic emails from WikiLeaks more than a week before they were leaked to the public.

CNN later corrected its story to say that someone who was not affiliated with WikiLeaks had emailed Trump Jr. to notify him that WikiLeaks had already published the hacked emails online.