CNN on Monday lamented the coarsening of the culture and a tone of incivility only getting worse with each day. Network analyst David Gergen blamed the President for “putting the country on a boil.” Yet, this is the same CNN that mocked Tea Party members in 2009 with vulgar and disgusting jokes.
During Newsroom, Gergen responded to aggressive comments by Donald Trump, Maxine Waters and others on the left and right. He blamed: “We have never had a President who... lit the fire and put the country on boil more than this one.”
Gergen seemed to accept that the problem of incivility has existed for a while, but he also put the responsibility mainly on Trump:
What has dramatically changed is the nature of our leadership. And the incivility in Washington. Now, incivility in Washington preceded Donald Trump to Washington. It was there long before he got there, the polarization and all the breakdown of norms was there. But it accelerated, deepened and has become much more poisonous.
To his credit, Gergen called out the left: “Hollywood culture never very sympathetic, for example, to the pro-life movement. Not very sympathetic to the Tea Party movement.”
Speaking of the Tea Party and incivility, CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2009 mocked members of the group with a sexual joke, saying, “It’s hard to talk when you are tea bagging.” Gergen, who was on CNN at that moment, laughed. (MSNBC journalists were also fans of the low humor.)
Maybe CNN should have a little self reflection when considering the problem of incivility.
A transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more:
CNN Newsroom
6/25/18
10:20POPPY HARLOW: This is America. 2018. I could go on. But this is all just in the last few weeks. Let's talk about civility. With me now, David Gergen, CNN senior political analyst and former adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. And Selena Zito is also here. David Gergen, you have lived through a lot, you have advised a lot of presidents, you have seen a lot. But where are we today?
DAVID GERGEN: We're adrift and the cry very, very much on boil, I think. The emotions are running very high on all sides. There are large number of people on both coasts who think Trump is totally unethical, that he's a moron, all the other kind of epithets one can think about. And there are people in his base who not only are strongly for him, but more strongly for him now and they're fed up with what a press and the left, they think, has been carping, doesn't give any credit whether for the economy, North Korea.
And gradually, I think both sides have now reached the point where they're so frustrated and so fed up and so impatient for change that this could lead almost anywhere. It is extraordinarily divisive. I cannot remember a time — the anti-war movement in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, you know, in the '60s and early '70s, both were much more civil in tone. Even anti-war movement was more civil in tone, certainly the civil rights movement among the people who are protesting.
HARLOW: Selena, to that point, I mean, you can impose the policy and you should be vocal about what you believe. Kicking Sarah Sanders out of a restaurant, trying to eat over the weekend, doesn't change policy. So that happened. And then Maxine Waters, the Democrat in Congress, you know, giving this featured rally and she calls for further division. And then you've got the Republican Party, though, giving this President in a new Gallup poll a 90 percent approval rating. And he is the epitome of division, right? He wouldn't argue he was divisive, he won't argue against that. How do you explain all this?
SELENA ZITO: First of all, the good news, that whole clip was disheartening, right? No matter what side of the aisle you're on, you're watching that and it makes your heart hurt. I will tell you the good news is I just drove from Savannah to Pittsburgh on the back roads, like 900 miles, 13 hours on the road and I didn't see anybody — I met people of all, you know, political persuasions, races — you didn't see people interacting, behaving that way with each other. So that's the good news. I think sometimes what happens on social media, and on the news, we see these things amplified. So as David said, we have had great, you know, divisive moments in political moments in history throughout this — throughout our history and this country.
But the problem is two fold. First of all, social media, as I just said, and the constant news coverage amplifies it and makes it bigger and makes it, you know, puts it in your living room. But, you know, I -- the problem, I think, for people that are going towards Trump's coalition is that the people that have the most power and culture are the people that live in the coasts. They're the ones in pop culture, right? They're the ones that are more part of the media, more part of Hollywood and those kinds of things that, like, De Niro said or Maxine Waters said pushes people who might not even really like Trump a lot, but pushes them away from the Democrats because they feel as though their culture is being disrespected.
HARLOW: So that point, here is what Glenn Beck said to Brian Stelter about exactly that this weekend.
BRIAN STELTER: Don't you understand what you're doing? You're driving people into the arms of Donald Trump. You're driving them into it.
HARLOW: David? David Gergen, what do you think?
GERGEN: Listen, I do think that cultural issue is a fair point. Our culture does not -- has never been very, you know, Hollywood culture never very sympathetic, for example, to the pro-life movement. Not very sympathetic to the Tea Party movement. And there are a lot of Americans who feel like they have been treated as second class citizens. But I must tell you, we have never had a President who is — lit the fire and put the country on boil more than this one. I think if, you know, the culture has been here for a long time. What has dramatically changed is the nature of our leadership. And the incivility in Washington. Now, incivility in Washington preceded Donald Trump to Washington. It was there long before he got there, the polarization and all the breakdown of norms was there. But it accelerated, deepened and has become much more poisonous. We're beginning to see threats to the way we live with each other. We're beginning to see threats to the whole idea we hold of a democracy, that we may have our disagreements, but we basically have the same values.
