Trump says he won’t appear on Fox News
Citing unfair treatment, Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is not going to appear on any Fox News shows “for the forseeable future,” reigniting a feud that has heated up and cooled throughout the summer.
”.@FoxNewshas been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future,” Trump tweeted at mid-day on Wednesday.
Fox News fired back a couple hours later, saying Trump had it all wrong, and that it was Fox who dumped Trump. A spokesman issued a statement, condeming Trump’s attacks on Fox’s journalists.
“At 11:45am today, we canceled Donald Trump’s scheduled appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on Thursday, which resulted in Mr. Trump’s subsequent tweet about his ‘boycott’ of FOX News,” the statement reads. “The press predictably jumped to cover his tweet, creating yet another distraction from any real issues that Mr. Trump might be questioned about. When coverage doesn’t go his way, he engages in personal attacks on our anchors and hosts, which has grown stale and tiresome. He doesn’t seem to grasp that candidates telling journalists what to ask is not how the media works in this country.”
The Republican presidential candidate had devoted Monday and Tuesday nights this week to blasting the network’s coverage of him on Twitter, tweeting and retweeting criticism.
“I am having a really hard time watching Fox News,” he wrote Monday night.
I think @megynkelly should take another eleven day “unscheduled” vacation.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2015
Trump also called out Bill O’Reilly on Twitter this week for having “the same old Trump haters” as guests and “refusing to ... post the great polls that came out today including NBC.”
.@oreillyfactor, why don’t you have some knowledgeable talking heads on your show for a change instead of the same old Trump haters. Boring!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2015
O’Reilly fired back on Tuesday, telling NBC’s Matt Lauer that Twitter is “like the worst thing you could give Donald Trump.”
“He wants people to like him. When people criticize him, he takes it personally,” the host of “The O’Reilly Factor” said. “So I just think this is just a extension of his reality show, ‘The Apprentice.’ This is just theater right now.”
Trump has criticized Fox’s coverage in the past, particularly in the case of Megyn Kelly, who asked him tough questions during the first GOP debate.
He and Fox News chief Roger Ailes have struck two truces in the last two months, the last one coming in late Augustafter Trump unleashed a series of tweets blasting “The Kelly File” anchor.
“Roger Ailes is great. He’s a special guy and a good friend of mine. We just spoke two minutes ago,” Trump told Laura Ingraham in an Aug. 25 interview. “I mean, Roger Ailes is a great guy and no, I have no problem,.”
The first truce came days after the Aug. 6 debate at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, where Trump had a contentious back-and-forth with Kelly and said in a later interview that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” (He later explained that he was referring to her nose.)
“Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on @FoxNews,” he wrote on Twitter at that time. “His word is always good!”