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AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Randall Stephenson fired back at the White House over its decision to suspend the press credentials of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta earlier this month, charging that the administration had ignored established procedures in a way that appears to violate press-freedom protections.
AT&T
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, of course, owns CNN after its roughly $81 billion purchase of Time Warner closed earlier this year. Stephenson has been CEO since 2007.
“If the White House wants to pull someone’s press credentials, there is a process,” Stephenson said at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D.Live conference late Monday. “That process must be followed, otherwise what is the criteria for pulling somebody’s press credentials?”
‘You didn’t like the line of questioning? Well, that kind of seems to be violative of our protections of freedom of the press.’
With the remarks, there’s a faint echo of the spat — mostly on Twitter and mostly at the orchestration of the president — between the White House and Amazon’s
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Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post; its coverage, Trump baderts, is unfairly skewed against him.
The Trump administration said it suspended credentials for Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, because he “placed his hands” on a White House intern who was trying to take a microphone from him at a televised press conference after President Trump grew weary of the questioning.
Read: Trump threatens more reporters’ credentials as he slams ‘stupid’ questioning
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted a video of the incident that appeared to have been edited in a way that made the reporter’s actions look more aggressive, according to an badysis by Storyful.
Read: Kellyanne Conway says Jim Acosta’s ‘karate chop’ clip wasn’t altered, it was ‘sped up’
Separately, Stephenson on Monday called again for clearer standards on net-neutrality rules, saying no company should be allowed to slow the content of another one. “We don’t really have legislative clarity,” he said, adding that companies “should not be able to block you from getting to Netflix
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or whatever you want to get to.”
The Trump administration, largely with telecom-giant backing, has pushed to revise Obama-era rules favoring open internet access.
Read: What the midterm election results could mean for net neutrality
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