Anderson Cooper embarrasses himself, defends CNNs decision to air Trumps town hall

It definitely feels like the cyclical nature of fascism and stupidity is really kicking everyone’s ass lately. It would be less disconcerting if we, as a society, didn’t treat the twin movements of “ignorance” and “violent fascism” like they were brand new, like there’s no way to know how to deal with these people. Too many people have the memories of fruit flies, like they can’t even remember what f–king worked two and a half years ago. In 2016, CNN gave hundreds of hours of free media time to then-candidate Donald Trump. CNN would simply run his Nazi rallies live on air, with little to no fact-checking or commentary. That was largely the policy for cable news up until November 2020, when Trump lost his mind on Election Night and began spouting the lies which would lead to an armed insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. What news organizations learned from November 2020 through January 2021 is that they cannot just blindly platform Trump and his lies and his violent threats. They have a civic and corporate responsibility to not put him on air without any context.

Well, this week, CNN decided to play it like it was 2016 all over again. The day after Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, CNN aired a “town hall” with the twice-impeached and currently indicted insurrectionist Donald Trump. As I said yesterday, it was grossly irresponsible on CNN’s part. CNN was widely criticized by all sides in the 24 hours after the town hall. Well, it got so bad that Anderson Cooper was ordered to make a statement about it at the start of his CNN show last night:

“You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again. But do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?” I’m so embarrassed for Anderson Cooper right now. What the f–k does he think he’s doing? Of course sensible people know that Trump is not “going away” any time soon. We also know that the white nationalist movement is not “going away,” but we would all agree that it would be f–king irresponsible for a news network to air a neo-Nazi town hall unedited, without fact-checking and without context, correct? Well, that’s exactly what CNN did. AGAIN. Just like they did in 2016 (and 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020). Why is CNN acting like November 2020 didn’t happen? That the insurrection didn’t happen? We shouldn’t have to watch as a major news network re-learns that it’s a bad idea to act as the go-to platform for a violent sexual predator, white nationalist and insurrectionist.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, screencap from CNN.

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