Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple reported Friday that in a chat with former New York Times television reporter Bill Carter on the SiriusXM show “The Bill Carter Interview,” CNN host Anderson Cooper confessed that he shouldn’t have handed Bernie Sanders his pro-Hillary “damn-emails” moment.
“I wish I had brought in one other candidate before I went to Sanders on the email thing because I knew Sanders would try to shut it down,” said the debate host. Call it a Candy Crowley assist?
Wemple analyzed:
Perhaps that would have been a better way to go, though there was no guarantee. After all, Chafee commented that the e-mails drive at a credibility crisis in American politics. When Cooper asked Clinton whether she wanted to respond, she said, “No,” to the delight of her supporters.
The assembled challengers weren’t prepared or disposed to mount a serious challenge to Clinton’s e-mail problem. That would have had to come directly from Cooper in a series of pointed questions. Posing them would have hijacked the debate, driving it into a homebrew rabbit hole; better to leave the prolonged e-mail cross-examinations to Cooper’s peers who sit for extended interviews with the candidate.
Cooper said, “I never want to be rude to anybody. Someone once said to me a saying their grandfather had told them, which is, I’m mangling the phrase: ‘It’s a lot harder to be kind than it is to be clever. Or it’s very easy to be clever, being kind is hard.’
Alex Griswold at Mediaite reported on another chunk of the Carter podcast. “After it was over, did you have interactions with the debaters?” asked Carter.
“No, I don’t want to talk with these people,” Cooper said. “Honestly, I’m not friends with these people. I don’t want to be friends with these people. It’s not my job. I went up beforehand, shook each of their hands.” He said he would have thanked them for appearing after the debate, but they all had their families around them.
“I don’t want to know these people,” he repeated. Carter asked, "You’re not going to schmooze with these people?"
“I just don’t feel it’s my job,"Cooper insisted. "I don’t want in any way to be impacted by — I don’t want anyone to think that I’m like, schmoozing with them. I don’t want people to think that I’m for one or the other.”
Cooper also dismissed Mark Hemingway's article in The Weekly Standard for implying he was pulling for Hillary Clinton. “The Weekly Standard put out a story the day of the debate saying I was a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, which is just such bunk,” he said. “Once, in 2007, I got a call about moderating a panel on, I don’t even know what it was....I showed up at the thing, I did my moderating, and I left.”
It was a panel on education for the "most vulnerable children." The most notable panelist for media junkies is Gary Knell, then president with the Sesame Workshop, who became president of National Public Radio and now is president at the National Geographic Society.
He added, "I’ve spoken at the Reagan Library at the request of Nancy Reagan...it’s about the same thing." That occurred in 2010. Cooper should know both these appearances were using his star power to add luster to the ex-presidents and please their post-presidential donors. The big difference in political perceptions is that Reagan was deceased, and Clinton's wife was running for president in 2007.
NB's Scott Whitlock reported Cooper went on the same defense on CNN before the debate.
