WATCH: "I didn't criticize the prime minister. I have a lot of respect for the prime minister," President Trump said.
More than 300 newspapers joined a nationwide effort to publish editorials on Thursday pushing back against President Donald Trump's ramped-up rhetoric against news media.
The Boston Globe first proposed a coordinated response by editorial boards nationwide last week as the president continues to rail against so-called "fake news" media organizations with claims that the press covers him unfairly.
Publications ranging from the New York Times to smaller regional publications such as the South Bend Tribune are part of the initiative.
"We're not your enemy. We just want to help make this community stronger. There's nothing fake about that…," the South Bend paper's editorial read and listed the staffers who are part of and report on the community.
"Christian Sheckler's investigative reporting on Elkhart County's criminal justice system revealed how poor policing led two men to spend years in prison for a crime they didn't commit, and how prosecutors continued to double down even in the face of new evidence. His work shed new light on a stark example of injustice," the editorial read.
Since his inauguration, President Trump has characterized major news organizations as "the enemy of the people". In a series of tweets on Thursday, Trump repeated the claim and declared "THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY. It is very bad for our Great Country....BUT WE ARE WINNING!" and accused the Boston Globe of collusion. "HONESTY WINS!" the president tweeted.
"Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news," the president said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention last month. "Just remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."
President Donald Trump sings along to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," playing before addressing the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at the convention center in Kansas City, Mo., July 24, 2018.
First amendment experts have raised concerns over the president's tone toward the media and worry about the possibility of violence towards the press.
"We should really understand this not just as an attack on specific journalists or outlets but as an attack on the public's right to know what the government is doing," Kaye said.
Another expert, however, thinks that the lack of trust that has been present for "quite some time" is a bigger issue than the president's language.
"The lack of trust is a much greater issue and it goes far beyond the president's trollish remarks about the media," Charles Whitaker, interim dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, told ABC News. "The president has been opportunistic in capitalizing on [the distrust] but I don't think he created this situation."
Whitaker added that "fair, free and robust media environment" is under attack not just by the president but by a business model that is "broken."
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times photographed on December 12, 2017.
The president said he had "a very good and interesting meeting at the White House" with Sulzberger in a tweet.
CNN News correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, reports from the briefing room at the White House, on August 2, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Last month, a CNN correspondent who was representing a number of networks as a "pool reporter" was "dis-invited" from covering an official White House event after she shouted out what the administration called "inappropriate" questions to the president about his former lawyer Michael Cohen and about a White House invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The White House Correspondents' Association condemned the administration's action.
And on Thursday, Trump in a tweet accused the Boston Globe of being "in COLLUSION with other papers" to push a false narrative that he is against press freedoms.
Later that day, the Senate passed a Democrat-authored resolution affirming Congress' support of the First Amendment and condemning attacks on the free press by Trump and members of his administration.
Meanwhile, papers participating in the broader editorial effort say it is a way to collectively voice the significance of the freedom of the press.