Donald Trump announces winners of his 'Fake News Awards'

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump unveiled the winners of his much-touted “Fake News Awards” late Wednesday, hours after a maverick senator from the president’s own Republican party accused him of employing Stalinist language to “slur” and undermine the free press.

Arizona lawmaker Jeff Flake levelled the broadside in an address from the Senate floor earlier in the day, delivering a one-two punch after veteran Republican John McCain penned an op-ed assailing Trump’s spoof awards.

The brash Republican president announced his top-ten list — which included his regular targets CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post — using his preferred medium of Twitter, linking to a list published on the Republican Party’s website that crashed minutes after his big reveal.

Below are the winners of the 2017 Fake News Awards, according to TRUMP.

1- The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed on the day of President Trump’s historic, landslide victory that the economy would never recover.

2- ABC News’ Brian Ross CHOKES and sends markets in a downward spiral with false report, says Trump.

3- CNN reported that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J. Trump, Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks.

4- TIME reported that President Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office. The ‘Fake News Awards’ say this is wrong.

5- Washington Post wrongly, as Trump says, reported the President’s massive sold-out rally in Pensacola, Florida was empty. Dishonest reporter showed picture of empty arena HOURS before crowd started pouring in.

6- CNN, according to Trump, falsely edited a video to make it appear President Trump defiantly overfed fish during a visit with the Japanese prime minister. Japanese prime minister actually led the way with the feeding.

7- CNN reported about Anthony Scaramucci’s meeting with a Russian, but retracted it due to a “significant breakdown in process.” Trump says it was false

8- Newsweek reported that Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda did not shake President Trump’s hand. Trump counts this story on the Fake News list

9- CNN reported that former FBI Director James Comey would dispute President Trump’s claim that he was told he is not under investigation. And it was wrong, Trump says.

10- The New York Times wrongly claimed on the front page that the Trump administration had hidden a climate report.

Flake slammed what he called the president’s dangerous disregard for the truth, and his designation of the mainstream news media as an “enemy of the people.”

“Mr President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” said the senator, an outspoken Trump critic who is not seeking re-election this year.

“When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that does not suit him ‘fake news,’ it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.”

Turning the tables on the president, Flake accused him of leading an “unrelenting daily assault” on the free press, even as his White House coined the term “alternative facts” — “as justification for what used to be called old fashioned falsehoods.”

“2017 was a year which saw the truth — objective, empirical, evidence-based truth — more battered and abused than any time in the history of our country, at the hands of the biggest figure in our government,” Flake charged.

– ‘Dishonest media’ –

At loggerheads with much of the US news media since his election, Trump finally doled out his “Fake News Awards” after weeks of speculation, recognizing what he had called “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media.”

Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who writes a regular opinion column — not news articles — for The New York Times, nabbed the number one spot.

The administration said he merited the award for writing “on the day of President Trump’s historic, landslide victory that the economy would never recover.”

Following the former reality star’s stunning rise to power, Krugman had written that Trump’s inexperience on economic policy and unpredictability risked further damaging the weak global economy.

The list also pointed to an error from ABC’s veteran reporter Brian Ross, who was suspended for four weeks without pay after he was forced to correct a bombshell report on ex-Trump aide Michael Flynn.

In follow-up tweets to his “Fake News” announcement, the commander-in-chief posted that “despite some very corrupt and dishonest media coverage, there are many great reporters I respect and lots of GOOD NEWS for the American people to be proud of!”

“Together there is nothing we can’t overcome — even a very biased media. We ARE Making America Great Again!”