Trump labels journalists unpatriotic, says they are putting lives in danger

US President Donald Trump. Photo / AP

US President Donald Trump has escalated his feud with the news media, accusing journalists of being unpatriotic and endangering lives after the publisher of the New York Times disclosed that he had warned Trump recently that his inflammatory rhetoric about the media could lead to violence.

Trump - who has made "fake news" a rallying cry and labelled journalists the "enemy of the people" - fired off a Twitter tirade yesterday from his New Jersey golf estate blasting the media for revealing internal government deliberations and for what he considers unfairly negative coverage of his presidency.

"When the media - driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome - reveals internal deliberations of our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk! Very unpatriotic!" Trump wrote.

Trump seems to have been responding to the lengthy statement issued earlier in the day by Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who publicly detailed his July 20 meeting at the White House with the President.

Trump first characterised their discussion as "a very good and interesting meeting", writing in a tweet yesterday that he and Sulzberger "spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, 'Enemy of the People'."

Sulzberger then took issue with Trump's interpretation of their meeting. The President had invited the publisher, and he was accompanied at the White House by James Bennet, the Times' editorial page editor, according to a Times spokeswoman.

The spokeswoman said that White House aides asked that the meeting remain "off the record", in keeping with past practice for such meetings, but that the President put it "on the record" with his tweet.

Sulzberger said in his statement, based on his and Bennet's notes, that he agreed to the meeting with Trump "to raise concerns about the President's deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric". "I told the President directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous," Sulzberger said. "I told him that although the phrase 'fake news' is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labelling journalists 'the enemy of the people'. I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence."