Panama City, FL - - In lieu of adding more in-person witnesses to a trial with a hard deadline, Tuesday’s proceedings in the $1 billion defamation trial against CNN featured the sworn deposition videos of five CNN employees who had their fingerprints on the offending report. One of the more eyebrow-raising testimonies of the bunch came from CNN anchor Jake Tapper who’s show - The Lead - the report initially ran on. In his testimony, Tapper claimed he didn’t know his title nor cared about the ratings of his show. But according to a post he made on X, that could be a lie since he has touted good ratings in the past.
Near the beginning of the video, after giving a brief overview of his film school education, Tapper was asked about where he was currently employed, “CNN,” and what his title was. That’s when the first curious answer cropped up: “I think it's chief Washington anchor and senior Washington correspondent. But I don't pay a tremendous amount of attention to titles. But I think that’s what it is. I am the anchor of several shows on CNN.”
There’s a jump in the video and Tapper is seen being asked about the ratings of his show where he proclaims that he doesn’t care about them:
VEL FREEDMAN (lead counsel, plaintiff): Mr. Tapper, can you give an overview of viewership numbers for your show The Lead, let’s start with?
TAPPER: I cannot.
FREEDMAN: You have no idea how many people watch The Lead on an average basis?
TAPPER: I do not pay attention to ratings.
After giving an explanation of how the Nielsen ratings system worked, Tapper reiterated: “And that Neilsen rating is how advertisers and shows and television networks determine how many people are watching the show at any given moment. And I do not pay attention to the Neilsen ratings. So, yeah.”
When delivering deposition testimony, the subject gets sworn in just like if they were testifying in court.
While Tapper claimed underoath that he didn’t care about the ratings, Peter Hasson, editor for the Washington Free Beacon, published a screenshot of Tapper’s X account where he was indeed touting the ratings of one of his “several shows on CNN” and even seemed to hint that he tracked them.
“Ratings go up and ratings go down, but UNITED STATES OF SCANDAL had the highest ratings in the key demo in cable news on Sunday … and was the most watched show on CNN! Thank you for watching!” he wrote.
https://t.co/vkAGHxD1vy pic.twitter.com/P9tUnW7QEd
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) January 14, 2025
He seemed pretty excited about that information; that very much seemed like he cared about and paid attention to the ratings.
Further, Freedman brought up his speaking engagement at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, where he lashed out at Fox News. “And I think the question is, if all you care about is clicks and newsstand sales and circulation and you don’t care at all about the truth and the facts, you end up with a settlement with Dominion Election Systems,” he sniped to the applause of the crowd.
He went on to grimly proclaim: “If all you care about is that, and you don’t care about the responsibility - the grave responsibility we have to be fair and to be honest, then you are a cancer on the democracy we have.”
Freedman turned it around by saying, “I’m just talking here about whether or not a news organization that tells willful lies is a cancer on society. Can you answer that question?”
Tapper became angry:
I mean, you can think whatever you want…I made a statement about the non-hypothetical, months-long campaign against Dominion Voting against Smartmatic against all the people that participated in the process in 2020 … You are asking me to comport with a metaphor that I used a year ago specifically about one specific news – or purported news organization and the opinion I had about how damaging those lies were to the American democracy. And you’re asking me to take that metaphor and extend it to any other time that any other media organization lied willingly, and I just don’t have an opinion on it.
Tapper also seemed to play dumb on the budget for his show:
FREEDMAN: Does The Lead have a budget?
TAPPER: I assume so, but I don’t know what it is.
FREEDMAN: Do you have any idea of how that budget is determined?
TAPPER: No.
And when it came to traveling, Tapper testified that he would just let CNN deal with all the logistics and he went where they permitted him to go. “That’s my request, but I am not in charge of any of the ‘how do we do it.’ Other people do that,” he testified.
Tapper may have been doing his best impersonation of Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes, “I know nothing. Nothing!”
