Fox News' Chris Wallace to Reince Priebus: 'You don't get to tell us what to do'

last updated 20 February 2017

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus clashed Sunday over President Trump's tweet labeling the media an "enemy of the American people."

"I don't have any problem with you complaining about an individual story" or bias, Wallace said. "But you went a lot further than that — or the president went a lot further than that. He said that the 'fake media' — not certain stories — the 'fake media' are an 'enemy to the country.'"

Priebus pushed back, arguing that the issue is "not just two stories" that may be marred by bias or error but "24 hours a day, seven days a week" of cable news programming that focuses not on the Trump administration's policy accomplishments but "total garbage, unsourced stuff" about personal dynamics between White House staff and alleged unsavory ties between the Trump campaign and Russian spies (a charge Priebus categorically denied in the same conversation).

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Wallace disagreed with Priebus' assessment, noting that every Trump action Priebus mentioned had received widespread cable news coverage. "You're right, some of these things were covered," Priebus conceded, "but you get about 10 percent coverage [of Trump's accomplishments] but then as soon as it was over the next 20 hours is all about Russian spies…"

Wallace cut him off: "But you don't get to tell us what to do, Reince, any more than that Barack Obama did. Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time, but I gotta say, he never said that we were an enemy of the people." Watch an excerpt of their exchange below. Bonnie Kristian

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.