White House Says Media Delegitimizing Trump, Won't 'Take It'

The White House vowed on Sunday to fight the news media "tooth and nail" over what officials see as unfair attacks on President Donald Trump, setting a tone that could ratchet up a traditionally adversarial relationship to a new level of rancor.

A day after the Republican president used his first visit to CIA headquarters on Saturday to accuse the media of underestimating the crowds at his inauguration, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus expressed indignation at the reports and referred to them as "attacks."

"The point is not the crowd size. The point is the attacks and the attempt to delegitimize this president in one day. And we're not going to sit around and take it," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."

Priebus complained about a press pool report that said the bust of Martin Luther King Jr had been removed from the Oval Office. The report on Friday night was quickly corrected but Trump called out the reporter by name at the Central Intelligence Agency on Saturday, as did spokesman Sean Spicer later in the day.

"We're going to fight back tooth and nail every day and twice on Sunday," Priebus said.

Elsewhere, Trump's aide Kellyanne Conway sharply rebuked "Meet The Press" moderator Chuck Todd over Inauguration Day crowd estimates, condemning the veteran journalist for calling the claims "ridiculous."

In a combative interview with the NBC News host, Conway was repeatedly pressed about Spicer's assertion that inauguration attendance was the "largest…ever" – and his blast at the media's "irresponsible and reckless" coverage.

Todd called Spicer's assertions a "falsehood" that "undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one" – but Conway mocked him for being "dramatic."

"Sean Spicer gave alternative facts to that," Conway said, to which Todd snapped back: "Alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods."

But when Todd later described Spicer's remarks a "ridiculous litigation of crowd size," Conway erupted.

"Chuck, your job is not [to] call things ridiculous," she declared. "You're a news person, not an opinion columnist… Think about what you just said to your viewers, that's why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air."

"All I'm looking for is an answer to a simple question," Todd concluded at the end of the tense interview. "You never answered why or the motivation of what was necessary about doing that yesterday."

"Tell me why you just referred to us as ridiculous. Why were we lied about," she jabbed back.

"I'm trying to ask basic questions, and you're attacking me with a weird Twitter feed that you're obsessed with," Todd replied. "You have another interview, I have the rest of the show."

During the fractious interchange, Conway at one point also rebuked Todd's laughing at one point, calling it "symbolic" of "the way we're treated by the press."

"The way you laughed at me is representative of the way we're represented by the press," she said. "We were mocked talking about the historic crowds for our campaigns. He brought in historic crowds and on great days we were ignored, and on most days we were mocked. Those crowds mattered, he built a movement. "

And when Todd probed Conway's assertion that there were "lies" published about Trump's rocky relationship with the intelligence community, she blamed CIA director John Brennan's comments.

"Do you think what the outgoing CIA director said, the language and vocabulary he used improves our relationship with the intelligence community," she said. "It is irresponsible."

Priebus also repeated Spicer's accusations that the media manipulated photographs of the National Mall to show smaller crowds at Friday's inauguration.

Aerial photographs showed the crowds for Trump's inauguration were smaller than in 2009, when Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, was sworn in.

The unexpectedly high turnout for Saturday's Woman's March on Washington outpaced the inauguration turnout. The Washington subway system reported 275,000 rides of as of 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) on Saturday.

The subway system said 193,000 users had entered the system by 11 a.m. on Friday, compared with 513,000 at that time during Obama's 2009 inauguration.