A top advisor of US President Donald Trump has described US mainstream media as President's real “opposition party” and told the press it’s time to “keep its mouth shut” and “listen for awhile.”
Stephen K Bannon, Chief White House Strategist for Trump, said the media should now keep quiet after being "humiliated" by the outcome of the November presidential election won by Trump.
"The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while," Bannon said.
"I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the US," Bannon said.
The brazen rebuke suggests there's unlikely to be pause in the administration's war against the US news media, which has been calling out Trump over ginned up and "alternative facts" statements.
Bannon, who played a key role in Trump's victory in the November polls, said the elite media got it all wrong when covering Trump's presidential campaign. He was formerly an executive at Breitbart, a conservative, alt-right news outlet.
"The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 per cent dead wrong," Bannon said, calling it "a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there."
"The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign," Bannon said.
"Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign. You were
humiliated," he alleged.
"The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work. You're the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You're the opposition party. The media is the opposition party," he said.
