gives him an opening to score a political point which is the media is somehow biased or out to get him. i think it s especially important in the trump incoming trump administration that the media is a fierce crusader for what is true and what we can prove and that is why buzzfeed airing an unverified dossier is so damaging because we don t know if it s true and trump thrives in a culture where we don t really know whathe facts are. he can just sayn the one hand or on the other, and the media needs to say, no, there are things that are true, there are things that are accurate, and these facts will hold donald trump accountable. i d like to have known what the cnn reporter s question was, by the way, we could have talked about what it meant. buzzfeed s editor in chief ben smith was on meet the press daily. here s how he defended his decision to release those documents. i think there was an when you would be the gatekeeper for information, you would say to your audience, trust u
as this elite target, this elise force that was not out there for anybody but themselves and their own special interests and not out for the american public and by undercutting us, he took away all of the ability to hold him up to facts, to hold him accountable for what he said because he made us people who were never telling the truth. unintentionally, gabe, he didn t make us a pac. he s basically saying there are good people and bad people. he didn t accuse the press, going back to joe mccarthy was mentioned by hugh, he didn t go to the jackal pack, what do you make of his tactics generally? today especially was fascinating because it was a divide-and-conquer strategy. i was at the press conference this morning and by singling out zzfe and cnn he tried to play to the other members of the press corps and it was effective and i thought by donald trump standards he was calm, confident, jocular, mixing it up with reporters and fundamentally he did not answer the substantive questions
there were some news organizations with all that was just said that were so professional, so incredibly professional, that i ve just gone up a notch as to what i think of you. okay? nbc s ken dilanian joins us now with the latest on what we know about those reports. i get from trump, it s not anger, it s righteous indignation playing that card pretty well, he s accusing cnn who introduced the notion of this story without giving any of its contents. it was not delivered to him in person as you and i talked about but delivered to his office in a classified manner, appropriate manner. but they were somehow in basketball terms using an alley-oop play, somehow cnn was setting up buzzfeed to do the dirty work. that seems to be what s driving donald trump. or is he simply trying to smear cnn be the behavior of what is right? accusing cnn or alley-oop play,
was identified, tagged, marked, clearly as disinformation. i believe cnn would have listed it that way and reported it that way. whoever gave it to them didn t tell them who it was. i think that s a fair assessment, i think they looked at it and said it s significant this is included in a classified intelligence report, why is it being transmitted this way, not some other way? that s the question i still have. ken dilanian, you re the pro. joining me right now, hallie jackson, a reporter with nbc news. she s outside trump tower. she was there today. give us your sense about having watched trump now, covered him, it can get very frictional. reporter: yeah. he seems like he s got the high ground tonight because he caught buzzfeed leaking putting out all these stuff that really turns out to be basically disinformation, not intelligence. reporter: right. i mean, listen, what happened today, right, the president-ele president-elect s, if you want to call it a performance or show
tonight on hardball, we bring you a special report right now on the stories that broke last night. as well as the president-elect s reaction to those reports today. the idea is to examine the relationship between the press in this country and the people in power who they cover. in his press conference today, president-elect donald trump criticized the website, buzzfeed, and also singled out c cnn. provoked a heated exchange with jim acosta of kcnn who attempte to ask a question. here s what happened. i think it s a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public. as far as buzzfeed, which is a failing pile of garbage, writing it, i think they re going to suffer the consequences. they already are. and as far as cnn, going out of their way to build it up, it s a disgrace and ai think they ough