Four days after President Obama insulted job creators by asserting "If you've got a business, you didn't build that; somebody else made that happen," CNN finally reported the controversial remarks, and only once the Romney campaign featured them in a campaign attack.
In contrast, when Romney surrogate John Sununu said on Tuesday morning that he wished "this President would learn how to be an American," it only took CNN a few hours to jump on the remarks. The network mentioned them every hour between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. and anchor Wolf Blitzer even brought Sununu on for an interview to explain himself.
In fact, the very first mention of Obama's remark on CNN came from Republican Senator Ron Johnson (Wisc.) on Tuesday morning's Starting Point. And CNN only reported the quote when Mitt Romney made it the centerpiece of his campaign's attacks on the President.
Correspondent Jim Acosta, who shadows the Romney campaign, quoted Romney paraphrasing Obama's gaffe in his campaign report that aired during the 2 p.m. hour of Tuesday's Newsroom. That evening, Anderson Cooper aired a report on both Obama's and Sununu's comments.
Ironically, CNN's White House correspondent Jessica Yellin highlighted the delay in the Romney campaign's response to Obama's gaffe, but made no mention of her network's four day silence. "[W]e talk about this campaign moving so fast that everything's at Twitter speed, but It actually took a few days for Team Romney to capitalize on this soundbite, but now it's getting traction," she said on Thursday's The Situation Room.
Yellin's own network should be embarrassed at catching up to a four day-old story only because the Romney campaign brought it to the forefront.
