At Townhall on Tuesday, writer and radio host Larry O’Connor perfectly captured what’s wrong with the liberal media’s attitude about press briefings. They’re supposed to provide information for the American people, but the press thinks it’s all about them, and their feelings. He cited CNN host Anderson Cooper, who opened his show Monday night with another pompous declaration of journalistic war. CNN's now owned by AT&T, which could stand for Anderson's Tempers and Tantrums.
Is this the Cable News Network, or the Cable Opinions Network?
ANDERSON COOPER: The White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing ended a short while ago, and if you tuned in to it hoping to hear from the country's top scientists, you were likely disappointed. What we mostly heard was the president.
What we saw was a hijacking -- a hijacking of the task force press conference by a president determined to rewrite the history of his early and reprehensibly irresponsible response to this virus.
What the president showed us today is what the nation's top scientists have to deal with every day, a president who now uses these briefings as a re-election platform, an opportunity to lie, to deflect, to attack, to bully, and cover up his own deadly dismissals of the virus for crucial weeks.
According to the president today, all governors are getting everything they need and testing is now and always has been great. Reporters who asked fair questions but didn't kowtow or suck up to this president were attacked and belittled.
Observations:
1. Cooper was certainly softer and sympathetic with Barack Obama over the years. In 2016, he admitted the reporters all agreed with Obama: “I wanted him to actually address people who disagree with him, not just people who agree with him that so often happens at, you know, a presidential news conference.”
2. If you think CNN's reporters from Jim Acosta on down are offering "fair questions" to Trump, you probably hate Trump's guts. CNN reporters attack and bully the people at the podium. (Cooper's also coming to the defense of the questioner from the China-owned press outlet.)
O’Connor noted that a CNN watcher wouldn’t get to see the entire briefing – they skip the president’s remarks, like Cooper's Opinions Network would, and then pounced:
The briefings are certainly being hijacked, but not by the president. The president can't hijack his own briefing. It's his briefing. But Cooper's assertion tells you everything you need to know about the real problem here.
Cooper and his peers think these briefings are theirs. They think the briefing room is for them. They think they get to make the rules and if the president or his staff don't adhere to them, they are out of line.
Anyone outside of Washington, D.C. and anyone who didn't waste tens of thousands of theirs or their parents' money on a journalism degree know that the truth is the exact opposite.
These are presidential briefings and the reporters are there to record the information delivered at them to the American people.
Amen.
