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Rich people have waged war on the media before -- Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel recently succeeded in shutting down the news website Gawker -- but the war wagers have never been president of the country before. So far Donald Trump has engaged in three Twitter wars since being elected, against The New York Times, "Saturday Night Live," and "Hamilton." He has assembled officials and journalists from all the news networks -- NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, and Fox -- not to set ground-rules and a tone as previous president-elects have, but to, according to various reports, berate and bully the reporters. A source told The New York Post, “Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.’ ” CNN is owned by Time-Warner, which is part of a proposed $85 billion merger with AT&T that needs government approval. During the presidential campaign, Trump railed against the merger, but so far has appointed lobbyists to his telecom transition team that favor such corporate unions. Hamilton Nolan, a former Gawker scribe now at Deadspin, wrote, "The single biggest barrier to the completion of this $85 billion media merger may be Donald Trump’s childish personal dislike of CNN’s news coverage of him." Back at the meeting with various TV networks, a source told The New Yorker, “He truly doesn’t seem to understand the First Amendment... He thinks we are supposed to say what he says and that’s it.” During the campaign, the press largely did, giving the Trump campaign nearly $3 billion in free airtime during the primary campaign, far more then any other candidate.