Early Tuesday morning, President-elect Donald Trump backed out of a scheduled meeting with the ‘failing’ The New York Times, claiming that the conditions of the meeting were changed last moment.
He later tweeted that ‘perhaps a new meeting will be set up’ after the newspaper ceases to cover him inaccurately.
In a third Tweet, the Republican billionaire has asked why would the paper announce that the ‘complaints about them are a 15 times high’.
The tweet was apparently in reference to The Times public editor Liz Spayd’s piece published over the weekend.
Spayd, in her article, had said the number of complaints to her office is five times the normal. She said influx of letters to editors, which are not necessarily complaints about the coverage of presidential election, is one of the largest since September 11, 2011.
The Times in its report about the scheduled sitdown said it only found out about the meeting being called off through Trump’s tweet.
“We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to,” said Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy.
She said Trump’s representative asked for a private meeting with nothing on the record. But the two sides later agreed to a small off-the-record session and a larger on-the-record session with reporters and columnists.