The Donald Trump administration wants a "healthy relationship" with the media, the White House has said, a day after his top aides said the government will rethink its ties with the press if it tries to "delegitimise" the new presidency.
"I want to make sure that we have a healthy relationship," White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.
Spicer was responding to questions from correspondents on the kind of relationship he wants to have with the media.
"You're talking about integrity and you're talking about telling the truth and facts. I don't know that it wasn't malicious at all, and I'm not saying. But there is a point at which we have a right to go out there and correct the record," Spicer said.
"Over and over again, there is this attempt to go after this president and say, well, that can't be true and that's not right and the numbers weren't there. There's a rush to judgement every time," he said.
"It is a two-way street," Spicer said.
He said the new president wants to have a healthy and open dialogue with the press corps and with the American people about what he's doing to help this country and to unite it.
"But in a time when he's trying to unite this and he keeps talking about uniting this nation, bringing this nation together, and then a tweet goes out in a pool report to a few thousand people saying that he removed the bust of Martin Luther King, how do you think that goes over?" he said.
The reporter had apologised.
Spicer said despite backlash from the media, Trump has defied the odds over and over again.
"He keeps getting told what he can't do by this narrative that's out there. He exceeds it every single time. I think there's an overall frustration when you turn on the television over and over again and get told that there's this narrative that you didn't win. You weren't going to run. You can't pick up this state," he said.
"That's a fool's errand to go to Pennsylvania. Why is he in Michigan? How silly, they'll never vote for a him. A Republican hasn't won that state since '88. And then he goes and he does it and then what's the next narrative? Well, it must have been because of this. He didn't win that.
