WILD: CNN Host Defends Press Obsessing Over Itself as Necessary Education of the Public

Having been a network where pomposity and an absence of humility reigned supreme during Jeff Zucker’s tenure, CNN has relapsed since Friday, when President Trump banned it from the White House, and thus it was no surprise that Wednesday’s The Arena included a breathtakingly absurd monologue from host Kasie Hunt arguing the press flaunting itself isn’t selfish or proof they don’t care about the American people.

Rather, she explained, it’s to ensure the American people understand that they need the “independent” press to function, and that White House reporters have zero motives, “imperatives,” or “responsibility beyond telling the truth.” 

Hunt’s absurdist take was precipitated by conservative panelist Kristin Davison laying waste to this self-centeredness after having had to listen to 36 uninterrupted minutes of discussion about the hearing into the ban that also took out MS NOW and Politico.

Davison had been asked about CNN’s new polling showing Trump’s approval rating at 32 percent, but Davison wasn’t having it: “So, we’re 36 minutes into this program, and we haven’t mentioned the American people once. What does this do to them? We are sitting here in a D.C. bubble, saying the poor press, we can’t go in, and that is why we talk about trust and how White Houses trust press corps is. The American people don’t trust the press.”

Davison continued: “And why is that? Because we’ve just spent 40 minutes talking about how bad the President is and how, you know, this is a — we are the victims, and that can’t be the case.”

She zoomed out to the implication of zero video coverage from the pool networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News — of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s arrival at Joint Base Andrews, noting the lack of images is probably beneficial to some Republican midterm candidates.

“Yes, [Trump’s] approval rating is down. The press approval rating and trust is even worse. And why is that? Because sometimes we forget the connectivity there, and that is what Trump has been so effective at doing. We’ve now spent the entire time talking about this and not about his approval rating, not about gas prices, not about diesel, not about the election,” she concluded.

Incredibly, Hunt chose not to rebut the last point, but doubled down on why we need to respect and get through our heads why the press matters.

After starting with the declaration that “[t]he point of all of this is not that news organizations are focused on themselves,” Hunt said the real “point is that independent, objective news organizations are there to get answers for the people who are reading and watching and seeing, because it’s the American people who deserve independent eyes and ears, eyes and ears that are not government-controlled eyes and ears.”

Showing the press will always think they’re more important Americans than you, Hunt tied 9/11 to the need for a national press:

At moments of our most critical national times, and we saw that probably most saliently on September 11th, when there was a pool traveling with President Bush to see Andy Card whisper in his ear as he read to schoolchildren that the second tower had fallen — or had been hit, and that America was under attack.

Hunt then impugned the motives of those who work for any White House, arguing “independent” journalists need to be trusted to tell you what matters:

The point of having a reporter from an independent news organization traveling with the President of the United States in that moment is because that reporter has no responsibility beyond telling the truth to the American people. They have no other imperative beyond that, and people who are operating on behalf of the government as government agents, employees, et cetera., they have potentially different motives. They are potentially protecting different things. They are potentially upholding different things[.]

Instead, she asserted, “reporters from independent news organizations are specifically devoted” to all Americans. She tossed in a vague allusion to bias as though it’s rare before wrapping with this idea news organizations writ large should be trusted (and seemingly blindly so):

And do we sometimes fall down on the job? We are all human. We are all human. We sometimes fall down on the job, but the job — the job is to do the very best you can, the very best we can to look and see at what is happening and to tell people what is happening without fear, without favor, and without putting anything ahead of them, without putting anything ahead of thinking about what does the audience need and deserve to know about their government? Because guess what? It’s them that are making the decisions about who should run it, who should be in charge. And that is why presidents, all presidents, this President, care so much — okay — about what that reporting is and how it’s presented.

The rest of the blog was a browbeating of Davison’s position, starting with senior legal analyst Elie Honig noting (albeit correctly) that “[t]he First Amendment doesn’t care whether you’re Newsmax, or PBS, or the BBC, or TMZ, you get the same protection.” He also insisted the First Amendment and the right to keep White House hard passes extends to even the most partisan news outlets.

Far-left partisan and supposed presidential historian Tim Natfali piled on, joined afterward by Biden Pentagon flack Sabrina Singh (click “expand”):

NAFTALI: [A]ll presidents are human beings and they overreact and they get angry, and, until recently, we had a White House that was able to curate a president’s moments of anger. Richard Nixon actually wanted to do even worse things that he ultimately was — that he ultimately did. John F. Kennedy had his moments, too, but they had a White House staff, and they had lawyers who were working on behalf of the presidency, not on behalf of the President, who protected the presidency by making sure the President’s eruptions didn’t become action. What seems clear, I think, is that the February — that, on Friday, the President erupted and his lawyers weren’t ready for his ban, and now, they’re trying to catch up and come up with sophist...arguments, but the point here is this presidency doesn’t have guardrails or any curation. And what we’re seeing is a personalized view of the press. All presidents have had it, but not all of them have shown it, because they know it’s not in the interest of the presidency.

(....)

SINGH: When I came into the White House and then later at the Pentagon, one of the things that the Trump the previous Trump administration had done is open it up to other outlets, more right-leaning outlets to allow them into the White House Briefing Room and to allow them into being part of the pool, and one of the conversations that we had at the White House at the time was, should we revoke these passes because they’re not considered legacy media. And, at the end of the day, we chose not to do that, because they not only had been credentialed by the — the White House or the Pentagon, but to Elie’s point, it doesn’t matter if you have a bias; if you are being credentialed today, it is CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. Tomorrow, it could be someone else. And so, we made that very conscious decision to maintain access and broaden it out. Now, again, we didn’t love always the coverage that we were getting from some of these outlets, but we still took their questions. I took their questions at the podium. It was important for transparency, and — and I, again, I think today we’re talking about CNN. Tomorrow, it could be someone else. And that’s why outlets are banding together.

Hunt further showcased her unseriousness by speaking out Russiagate flunkie Andrew McCabe’s opinion (click “expand”):

HUNT: [O]n this question of national security, I mean, we have often actually viewed our free press and the way that free and fair information can be spread around the world as something that actually enhances our national security. That obviously has fallen out of favor somewhat in the last decade or so. But I know you are also looking at the ways in which this administration sometimes seems not to prioritize national security. Lay that out for us.

MCCABE: Yeah....[P]art of the — the image and the projection of our American values around the world, particularly with governments like China, like Russia, like places like Turkey, other places, Georgia that don’t have a free and fair press, part of our constant reminder to them is, look, we do — we deal with it. We — we suffer the barbs that the press has for us on occasion, because it’s more important to have an educated, informed populace....[Y]ou have to look at what they didn’t do to respond to the alleged national security threat here. I think it was Katelyn [Polantz] mentioned earlier, there is a timeline here that does not favor that interpretation. The articles that — that CNN allegedly published were back as early as last January, and the people who published those articles have had continued access to the White House during this time. That’s not something you would do if you actually thought those reporters were involved in some sort of threat to national security. They also did not identify any specific — confidential, or alleged confidential or classified information...[T]he administration made no effort to approach the news entities...try to have one of those conversations where you say, look, you really — you are, you know, unintentionally creating a national security threat that could put our troops in harm’s way...I’ve been in those conversations with some news organizations. And, you know, they listen, and they make their own judgment ultimately as to whether or not they’ll refrain from publishing the thing that we’ve objected to, or maybe go ahead with it. But that’s the way the process is supposed to work. Clearly, it didn’t happen here.

She went to break with a mini-monologue restating her position that people must remember “what this is really about, which is the ability of the people, the American people, to have free, fair, independent information about their government and the rights that they have as well to criticize the government.”

Finally, going to commercials, she cued up a clip of President John F. Kennedy waxing poetic about the press (which helped him cover up his drug use and sexual exploits):

To see the relevant CNN transcript from September 23, click here.