“They’re very hostile. These are very hostile people. These are very angry people,” President Donald Trump told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity of the media. Interviewing Trump tonight, Hannity said, “The New York Times, CNN, NBC, they’ve used the word ‘liar’ to describe you, as it relates, if you’re talking about crowd size.” 
 
 “They also colluded against you in a campaign,” Hannity continued. “And my question to you is — “ 
 
 “They’re very dishonest people,” interrupted Trump, who wasn’t finished with his thought. “The media is very dishonest. I’ve been saying it. I say it openly.” 
 
 “I said journalism is dead. So we agree,” said the Fox News Channel personality. 
 
 “Never dead,” Trump disagreed.”But they’re very dishonest people, in many cases,” Trump conceded. “You have some very honest ones. But I get stories that are so false and so dishonest.” 
 
 “Martin Luther King’s bust?” Hannity mentioned, helpfully. (In a White House pool report about Trump’s first actions after being sworn in, Time magazine journalist Zeke Miller had reported that the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. Miller corrected the report minutes later, explaining the bust had been obscured by a door and a Secret Service agent. White House press secretary Sean Spicer called it “a reminder of the media danger of tweet first, check facts later.”) 
 
 “That’s a very serious change,” Trump told Hannity tonight. “Because they’re not saying the bust was taken out. What they’re saying is that I’m a racist.” 
 
 “When it was revealed that it was wrong, it wasn’t even a story. Nobody even knows it.” ||||| President Donald Trump defended his forthcoming executive orders that are expected to suspend the United States’ refugee program and halt the issuing of visas to citizens of certain countries, saying, "We can't take any chances." 
 
 "Right now, the FBI has over 1,000 [terrorism] investigations going on … and these are people that we let in," Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive cable interview from the White House Thursday. "We don’t need this. Some people have come in with evil intentions. Most haven’t, I guess, but we can’t take chances." 
 
 A draft executive order, which Trump could sign as early as Saturday, reportedly would halt the United States' broader refugee program for 120 days and prohibit citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria or Yemen from obtaining U.S. visas for at least 30 days. 
 
 "We’ve taken in tens of thousands of people. We know nothing about them. They can say they vetted them. They didn’t vet them, they have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don’t know anything about them and they have no papers?" Trump asked. 
 
 TRUMP TO ORDER CONSTRUCTION OF US-MEXICO BORDER WALL; EXPECTED TO SUSPEND REFUGEE PROGRAM 
 
 Trump also defended his executive order to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a key promise of his presidential campaign. 
 
 "The wall is necessary," Trump said. "That’s not just politics, and yet it is good for the heart of the nation because people want protection and a wall protects. All you’ve got to do is ask Israel." 
 
 The president also revisited the issue of torture, saying that he believes methods such as waterboarding are effective. However, Trump added that he would follow the advice of Defense Secretary James Mattis, who has argued against the use of such tactics. 
 
 "Look, I spoke with people who were in this world that we’re talking about," Trump told Hannity. "They said, ‘Absolutely, it works.’ Now, General Mattis said that he doesn’t intend to use it. I’m with him all the way. Do I believe it works? Yes, I do." 
 
 The president also swiped at the media, which he said was made up of "very hostile people" and "very angry people." 
 
 WATCH: TRUMP STRATEGIST BANNON TORCHES NY TIMES, MAINSTREAM MEDIA 
 
 "The media — much of the media, not all of it – is very, very dishonest," Trump said. "Honestly, it’s fake news. It’s fake. They make things up." 
 
 Trump covered a range of other topics in the interview, including his goal of repealing and replacing ObamaCare, which he called a "horror show” and a “disaster.” 
 
 “It actually explodes [this year]," Trump said, "and I told [congressional] Republicans. I said, 'Look if you really want to do something, just let it explode, and then [the Democrats will] come begging us to fix it.’ But that’s not the right thing for the public because we have to get it fixed." 
 
 "I do believe we're going to have a much better plan, we're going to have a cheaper plan, I think it's going to be a lot less expensive,” he added. 
 
 Trump also disclosed that he had decided on his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court "pretty much in my mind." He had previously said he would announce his choice Feb. 2. 
 
 The president blasted Democrats threatening to hold up his eventual nominee – and said he would want Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to use the so-called “nuclear option” if they filibuster. 
 
 “I would. We have obstructionists,” Trump said, complaining about Democrats’ treatment of other nominees, including Attorney General pick Jeff Sessions. The “nuclear option,” if pursued, would allow majority Republicans to seek approval of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee with just a simple majority, as opposed to a 60-vote threshold. 
 
 The president also said he was examining the case of Navy sailor Kristian Saucier for a possible pardon. Saucier, 29, was sentenced to a year in prison for taking photos of parts of a submarine's nuclear propulsion system. As a candidate, Trump contrasted Saucier's treatment with the FBI's decision not to charge Hillary Clinton for using personal email while secretary of state. 
 
 PARDON ME: NAVY SAILOR IN JAIL FOR SUBMARINE PHOTOS PLEADS FOR MERCY FROM TRUMP 
 
 "I think it’s very unfair in light of what’s happened with other people," said Trump, who added that he wouldn't even consider a pardon if not for the outcome of the Clinton investigation. "How can you have somebody else get away with such a tremendous amount and then this person who takes a picture of his desk on an old submarine? Look, if China or Russia wanted information on that submarine, they’ve had it for many years. That I can tell you." ||||| President Trump (Evan Vucci/AP) 
 
 Once upon a time (like, three months ago), “fake news” had a precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope's endorsement — and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the presidential election. 
 
 Since then, conservatives — led by President Trump — have hijacked the term and sought to redefine it as, basically, any reporting they don't like. At the extreme end of absurdity, Trump actually asserted on Monday that “any negative polls are fake news.” 
 
 Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017 
 
 All but Trump's most lemming-like followers will recognize the logical fallacy of such a statement. The risk that voters, on the whole, will accept the idea that “negative equals fake” is probably very low. 
 
 More insidious is the notion that a report qualifies as fake news if it requires a correction. Such an overly broad definition unfairly attaches malicious intent to the kinds of mistakes that inevitably appear in good-faith journalism. 
 
 Trump seemed to endorse this definition on Wednesday when he tweeted a link to a Federalist article that purports to identify 16 fake news stories. 
 
 '16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won' https://t.co/0dHld5kiVc — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017 
 
 Some of the reports named by Federalist contributor Daniel Payne were indeed plagued by errors, but only a few could plausibly be called fabrications, and only one originated with a journalist. 
 
 That singular case involved a tweet by Dana Schwartz, who (ironically) covers arts and entertainment for the Observer newspaper that was owned by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, before he became a White House adviser. Schwartz tweeted on Jan. 27 that “Trump 100% photoshopped his hand bigger” in an Inauguration Day photograph. There was no reporting to back up the claim. Other journalists, including The Washington Post's Philip Bump, quickly debunked it. 
 
 On Jan. 29, the Daily Beast sloppily published a fictional news report on the Quebec City shooting by a parody Twitter account that was styled to resemble that of Reuters. The phony report that originated with the now-suspended Twitter account @ReutersBrk falsely claimed to have identified two shooters. 
 
 In another fact-checking failure, a Fox affiliate in Detroit failed to corroborate the story of an Iraqi immigrant, who lied in an interview about the date of his mother's death. The man blamed Trump's travel ban for keeping his mother, who he said needed medical treatment, in Iraq. In fact, his mother died five days before Trump ordered the ban. 
 
 Other reports cited by Payne were not made up; they were simply wrong. The best-known example is an erroneous White House pool report that originated with Time writer Zeke Miller, who emailed fellow journalists on the night of Trump's inauguration to say that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was no longer on display in the Oval Office. It turned out that the bust had been obscured by a door and a Secret Service agent while Miller was in the Oval. 
 
 The King bust had replaced a Winston Churchill bust during Barack Obama's presidency. Trump told the New York Times shortly after his election that he was thinking about returning the Churchill bust to the Oval Office, which naturally put the King bust's status in doubt. The idea that the King bust might be removed was not a media invention; it originated with Trump himself. 
 
 When Miller saw the Churchill bust on Inauguration Day but did not see the King bust, he thought one had replaced the other. He was incorrect, but that does not mean he was spreading fake news. 
 
 Still other reports were not wrong at all; it's just that their framing irked conservatives. Payne objected to the way some left-leaning outlets, such as Slate, Vox, BuzzFeed and ThinkProgress, covered Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's remark during a confirmation hearing that a school in Wyoming probably had a gun “to protect from potential grizzlies.” 
 
 The coverage by these outlets was full of mockery, no doubt. And perhaps, as Payne wrote, it missed DeVos's broader point about the need to empower local school districts to set their own policies on guns and other issues. But snarky and off-the-mark are not the same as factually inaccurate, and certainly not the same as fake news.
– One night after sitting down for his first one-on-one interview as president with ABC News, Donald Trump granted Sean Hannity the same privilege at the White House Thursday evening, and he offered as many ear-perking nuggets as he had the day before. Still on his radar, per Deadline: the "very hostile" media, which he went on to describe as also being "very angry" and "very dishonest." "I get stories that are so false," he told Hannity, specifically calling out an erroneous report by Time magazine writer Zeke Miller that Trump had removed a Martin Luther King Jr. bust from the Oval Office (Miller later tweeted a correction for his mistake). "It's fake news. … They make things up," he added, per Fox News. Other snippets from the interview: He let fly his feelings about Madonna, who made headlines at the Women's March Saturday for saying she'd thought "an awful lot about blowing up the White House." "Honestly, she's disgusting," Trump told Hannity, adding that what she said was "disgraceful," per the Telegraph. "I think she hurt herself very badly. I think she hurt that whole cause." "Disgrace" is also a word he used to describe a recent tweet about his son, Barron, by now-suspended SNL writer Katie Rich. "I don't mind some humor, but it's terrible," Trump said. "For NBC to attack my 10-year-old son … it's a disgrace. He's a great boy. And it’s not an easy thing for him. Believe me." He had thoughts on President Obama as well, who rode with him in a limo on Inauguration Day. "What amazed me is that I was vicious to him in statements, he was vicious to me in statements, and here we are getting along … riding up Pennsylvania Avenue," he said, adding, "I like him, he likes me … you're going to have to ask him, but I think he likes me." Moving on to official presidential business, he labeled ObamaCare a "horror show" and a "disaster," said he had a Supreme Court justice nominee "pretty much in my mind," and noted that even though Secretary of Defense Mattis doesn't advocate waterboarding, he himself "absolutely" believes it is effective, per Fox. On his long-talked-about wall, Trump said it was "necessary." "People want protection and a wall protects," he said. "All you've got to do is ask Israel." (One possible way to pay for the wall: a 20% tax on Mexican imports.)