On Tuesday night, CNN again treated it as somehow newsworthy that a public official may have family members that they are not even close to who disagree with them politically as host Anderson Cooper showed a pre-recorded interview with retired Dr. David Glosser, the uncle of White House advisor Stephen Miller, about an op ed in Politico he wrote in which he called Miller an "immigration hypocrite."
Additionally, earlier in the day, on CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, CNN analyst Chris Cillizza took about four minutes to recall several Republicans who have had recent public disagreements with relatives, and replayed a clip of Glosser from his appearance earlier on New Day.
At 8:54 p.m. Eastern, introducing a five-minute segment on Dr. Glosser, Cooper informed viewers:
White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller is one of the architects of the President's approach to immigration, and now Miller is coming under attack for that in a new op ed in Politico. However, it's not written by a pundit or a political insider -- it's written by his uncle, David Glosser.
In his first question, the CNN host posed: "In the piece you wrote, you described your nephew, Stephen Miller, as an 'immigration hypocrite.' What do you mean by that?"
After Dr. Glosser recalled that more than 100 years ago, his ancestors left what is now Belarus because of anti-Semitic violence and came to the U.S., which also saved them from the Holocaust decades later, Cooper followed up: "Do you see this administration itself as hypocritical? The First Lady -- her parents just got citizenship based on what the administration would call 'chain migration'?"
Dr. Glosser ended up admitting that he barely knows Miller, and that all he knows about his political views comes from what is in the public domain, which further underscores that there is hardly anything unusual about a distant relative disagreeing with a public official:
I don't know the fellow very well. I met him perhaps a total of 10 times in my life, and haven't had a substantive conversation with him for many years. Everything I know about him really is drawn from his public persona, from his actions, and from what he has said and what he's written.
Again, no mention was made of any of the arguments against Dr. Glosser's liberal views on what modern-day immigration policy should be.
Earlier in the day on CNN Newsroom, Cillizza informed viewers of Virginia Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte's son criticizing his father on Twitter and announcing that he donated to the Democrat who is running to replace his retiring father. The CNN analyst also played a clip of Dr. Glosser, recounted that White House advisor Kellyanne Conway's husband has been a big critic of President Donald Trump on Twitter, and recalled that Ivanka Trump has sometimes voiced disagreements with her father.
