Trump unveils ‘Fake News Awards’

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump unveiled the winners of his much-touted “Fake News Awards” on 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.

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 topten list – which included his regular targets CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post – using Twitter, linking to a list published on the Republican Party’s website that crashed minutes after his big reveal.

Flake slammed what he called Trump’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 Arizona senator, who is not seeking reelection this year.

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

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 on Trump’s list.

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 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 former Trump aide Michael Flynn. – AFP