Republican Senator Ted Cruz has thrown his support behind US President Donald Trump in his row with The New York Times, which he has labeled as “partisan propagandists.”
Cruz, who ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries, said in a tweet Sunday that The Times is “destroying itself.”
“The NYT is destroying itself w/ Trump hatred. And it’s ultimately bad for freedom of the press when ‘journalists’ openly revel in being partisan propagandists. When our Nation is so tribalized that each side has their own ‘news’ & ‘facts’ and we don’t even talk to each other,” said the Texas lawmaker.
Trump has often used “fake news” to describe news reports that do not support him or his administration. He has specifically targeted outlets including CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post and has often called the press the “enemy of the people.”
Cruz was citing a story by the conservative blog Red State, which claims a New York Times editor said “(in effect) ‘for 2 yrs, we covered ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ facts be damned; now we’ll scream ‘racism, racism, racism’ for 18 mos, and the rest of the media follow us.’”
“That’s not journalism,” Cruz said, calling the paper a “propaganda outlet by liberals, for liberals.”
“It’s also deeply cynical—at a time when racial tensions are raw, for the NYT to be deliberately stoking the fires of racial tension & hatred. Ironically, their approach is the obverse of their original headline (before they succumbed to the mob): “NYT Urges Racism Vs Unity,” Cruz tweeted.
Trump has recently been slamming what he describes as a “racism witch hunt" against him.