President Donald Trump urged The Washington Post Saturday to fire Dave Weigel after the reporter tweeted a misleading photo Friday depicting a sparsely populated arena taken before the president’s Florida rally commenced.

Weigel tweeted a photo Friday of the arena in Pensacola where Trump held a rally that evening. The photo, which included the description, “Packed to the rafters,” showed rows and entire sections of empty seats. The reporter later deleted the tweet and apologized for his error after he found out the photo had been taken well before Trump actually spoke.

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“@DaveWeigel @WashingtonPost put out a phony photo of an empty arena hours before I arrived @ the venue, w/ thousands of people outside, on their way in,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Real photos now shown as I spoke. Packed house, many people unable to get in. Demand apology & retraction from FAKE NEWS WaPo!”

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In response to the president’s rebuke, Weigel tweeted, “Sure thing: I apologize. I deleted the photo after @dmartosko [the Daily Mail’s David Martosko] told me I’d gotten it wrong. Was confused by the image of you walking in the bottom right corner.”

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But the president wasn’t satisfied with Weigel’s apology.

“@daveweigel of the Washington Post just admitted that his picture was a FAKE (fraud?) showing an almost empty arena last night for my speech in Pensacola when, in fact, he knew the arena was packed (as shown also on T.V.),” Trump tweeted. “FAKE NEWS, he should be fired.”

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Weigel’s tweet with the misleading photo of the Trump rally capped off a troubling couple of weeks for the media, filled with several significant mistakes.

CNN also found itself Trump’s target when the president blasted the outlet Saturday for reporting Friday that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., received an email on September 4, 2016, offering him WikiLeaks documents obtained through the Democratic National Committee hack. The email, however, had been sent on September 14, after the hacked emails were already made public. CNN acknowledged its mistake and issued a correction.

“Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday. They were caught red-handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News (who should be immediately fired for his ‘mistake’),” Trump tweeted in response. “Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”

The president added: “CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!”

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CNN told Politico that the reporters, Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb, would not receive discipline for their erroneous report.

Earlier in December, ABC News reporter Brian Ross was suspended after he mistakenly reported that Trump directed former national security adviser Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials during the presidential campaign. But Flynn received the order during the transition period following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, not during the course of the campaign.

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected].

(Photo credit, homepage image: Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)