The Elitist Media never rests when it comes to pursuing partisan narratives that may help their preferred political tribe win an argument or a news cycle. Some of the angles they pursue are so transparently dumb and shameless, though, that you have to wonder.
Watch as CNN’s Manu Raju builds a weird reality TV angle only to bankshot it into a cheap shot against Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (click “expand” to view transcript):
PEAK JOURNALISMING: Watch as CNN's Manu Raju works a weird reality TV angle into a cheap shot of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pic.twitter.com/cxejgND3Qy
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) May 10, 2026
CNN INSIDE POLITICS
5/10/26
11:53 AM
MANU RAJU: Reality TV stars have found a way into our politics. Just look at the current occupant of the Oval Office. So could one now be the next mayor of the nation's second largest city? Well, Spencer Pratt, a former star of the reality show The Hills, has rocketed to the forefront of the Los Angeles mayoral race after repeatedly taking on the current mayor, Karen Bass, in a debate this past week. Pratt’s a Republican running in the nonpartisan race, and he hit her particularly hard on her response to last year's wildfires.
SPENCER PRATT: I blame this person for burning my house and my parents’ house and my town, and all my neighbors’ down. I am not working with Mayor Bass.
RAJU: Ahead of the June 2nd primary, Bass responded to that criticism on CNN last night.
KAREN BASS: Let me just say that as the mayor of the city, the buck stops with me. That is very, very clear. What was true of our city, but not just our city, our region, our county was that we were not prepared.
RAJU: And Spencer Pratt’s not the only reality TV star trying to gain political traction. Luke Gulbranson from the show The Summer House is running to represent northern Minnesota in the House of Representatives. He's running as a Democrat in a district President Trump won by 14 points in 2024.
And it's not just current candidates. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who appeared on a pair of MTV reality shows in the 1990s including The Real World, said this week that for the past seven months, he and his family have been filming for a Trump-approved show called The Great American Road Trip that is set to air on YouTube.
SEAN DUFFY: So I want to lean into America's 250th birthday. Rachel and I actually met on a road trip on a reality TV show. And so over the course of seven months, we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work. I could take the kids with me, do a road trip.
RAJU: But the project has raised some ethical concerns since its sponsors include several companies whose businesses inters- interests intersect with the agency that Duffy oversees. And yesterday, Duffy attacked what he called the, quote, “radical, miserable, left” for criticism of the project and said it was fully within ethics rules as reviewed by federal officials. But no one can dispute that it’s perhaps not the cheapest time to go on a road trip.
The segment started with a mention of President Donald Trump before transitioning to Spencer Pratt, whose L.A. mayoral candidacy is surging after a solid debate performance and a series of viral videos. That alone could have been a segment, but Raju quickly moves on to Luke Gulbranson and his congressional race before settling on his real target: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Duffy has long been a target of Official Washington, seething at the fact that Duffy exposes how very bad his media-loved predecessor was. Duffy is targeted because of his recently-announced show The Great American Road Trip, which ties into America’s 250th anniversary celebration.
In order to make this tenuous segment work, Raju leaves out the fact that Duffy was a prosecutor and was elected to Congress where he served for four terms. Those inconvenient facts don’t bolster the “reality show star” narrative, though. So viewers get this slop instead.
