President-elect Donald Trump will meet with the New York Times on Tuesday, hours after announcing on Twitter that he had canceled their scheduled meeting because the newspaper had changed the terms—an account the Times disputed.
“I cancelled today’s meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice,” Trump said early Tuesday morning. “Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes. In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!”
In a statement Tuesday morning, the Times contradicted Trump’s account, explaining that the president-elect had tried to cut an on-the-record portion of the meeting.
“We were unaware that the meeting was cancelled until we saw the President Elect’s tweet this morning. We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to. They tried to yesterday—asking for only a private meeting and no on-the-record segment, which we refused to agree to,” the Times said in a statement. “In the end, we concluded with them that we would go back to the original plan of a small off the record session and a larger on the record session with reporters and columnists.”
Hours later, Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said the meeting was back on schedule. She said Trump would have an off-the-record meeting with the paper’s publisher and an on-the-record meeting with journalists and columnists. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks also confirmed to a pool reporter that Trump would meet with the Times.
Trump frequently uses Twitter to lash out at news outlets, particularly the Times, for their coverage of him. Tuesday’s Twitter tirade followed a meeting he hosted Monday with more than two dozen broadcast journalists, the New York Times reported. The contents of the meeting were off-the-record and have largely remained confidential, but some in attendance told the Times that Trump used the meeting to criticize news networks and anchors for their coverage of his presidential campaign.