When the big networks realized that President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a second discussion in Germany, they went nuts. The coverage made it seem like a dark and sinister deal was struck in a hidden alley. In reality, the President went over to talk to Putin at a G-20 dinner in front of every major world leader and enough media to make your head spin. Despite this fact, the media portrayed the "meeting," if you can call it that, as "secret" and "undisclosed."
In response to the overblown coverage, Trump tweeted the following:
CNN's Chris Cillizza responded on New Day and other places including Twitter to denounce Trump's "misdirection." In a CNN article last updated at 2:40 PM that day (well after two CNN anchors labeled the meeting "secret"), he wrote:
This is a classic bit of Trump misdirection. No media outlet reported anything about a "secret dinner." No one is making the dinner look "sinister." And, no one is suggesting that the media was unaware that the dinner was taking place.
But as Matthew Boyle of Breitbart pointed out:
On the same day that Cillizza published his fake news—Wednesday, July 19—two different CNN anchors contradicted his assertion that nobody said the meeting was “secret” live on air on CNN.
Brooke Baldwin, a CNN anchor, twice referred to the meeting as a “secret sitdown” between Trump and Putin—and even at one point asked, “Why didn’t we know about this?”
Another time, Baldwin said live on CNN, “These two presidents, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, did not disclose a second meeting until now.”
Kate Bolduan, another CNN anchor, also repeated the line that it was a “secret” meeting between Trump and Putin.
Bolduan on Wednesday called it a “secret and second sitdown between the president and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Why wasn’t the meeting revealed? What was discussed? And who knows what really was said?”
Also on Wednesday, Bolduan described the meeting a second time live on CNN as “secret.”
She called it “a secret sitdown between the President and Vladimir Putin. Only three people know what they said at all, what was talked about, how unusual is this? Did it break any rules? Can it happen again? And why wasn’t it revealed that they met for a second time?”
Roll the clip:
Oops. That's fake news.
