Wade Heath of Mediaite got an exclusive blast of anger from a set of former pro-Trump contributors at CNN. They have been the "fig leaf" of balance on an overwhelmingly anti-Trump lineup of anchors, correspondents, and pundits. These men say the same thing conservatives viewers do: CNN thinks the only good Republicans is a Never Trumper.
“Who are the Republicans?” our friend Stephen Moore said in a phone conversation with Mediaite, questioning the loyalties of those who remain as part of the dwindling line-up. “John Kasich? He hates Trump!”
Moore left CNN when he was briefly nominated for the Federal Reserve board, but liberal journalists unleashed a fierce fusillade of objections. Moore pulled out.
“CNN is the hate Trump network,” Moore told Mediaite. “They just trash Trump every single hour of every single day. All they’ve talked about for two years is the Mueller report, and how bad does it make them look now that it proved nothing?”
Bryan Lanza, who served as deputy communications director for Trump’s presidential campaign, left the network last year. Lanza told Mediaite of his time inside the "news" network: “CNN’s only identity is being anti-Trump; not conservative vs. liberal.”
“If you hate Trump, you tune to CNN to validate your hatred,” Lanza said. “Not sure it’s a winning formula and I’m validated by their last place performance against other outlets.”
“Most of us got squeezed out involuntarily,” former Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston told Mediaite of his CNN contributorship that was left to expire in February. “I was there for two years and was certainly willing to continue. It was clear to me in the end that the Republicans they prefer are anti-Trump Republicans.”
Conservative talk radio host and former CNN contributor Buck Sexton used to try and get a word in edgewise.
“People ask me ‘how could you ever have worked at CNN?’ and I tell them, honestly, that CNN has always been Left of center, but it used to have on real conservatives and, while not friendly to them, was at least interested in a serious exchange of ideas,” Sexton wrote in a tweet earlier this year. “But Trump broke CNN.”
“CNN used to pretend it accepted right wing voices for balance, but now it openly despises conservatives who are pro-Trump,” Sexton told Mediaite. “Today the entire enterprise clings to a fundamental dishonesty: that it has no political agenda. Taking down Trump is obviously the agenda. And in this regard, some of CNN’s ‘hard news’ anchors are the biggest journalistic frauds of all.”
When asked if Sexton would ever consider working with CNN again, he responded: “Would I go back? Sure, if CNN stopped being crazy!”
“And as for CNN’s current conservative contributors,” Sexton wrote in a March tweet, “there is not a single high profile, ready-to-fight for Trump, MAGA supporter among them. When 90% of the GOP supports the president, this isn’t an oversight, it’s a propaganda maneuver.”
