On Monday, during a testy Oval Office exchange with liberal CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, President Trump alleged her network hates the United States of America: “They don’t like putting out good numbers… I think they hate our country, actually.”
Moments later, Inside Politics host Dana Bash took umbrage with the President’s claim: “For the record, since we heard President Trump say in the Oval Office that CNN hates our country, CNN does not hate our country. That should go without saying.”
Clearly we’ve got two conflicting accounts here. To help get to the truth, we at NewsBusters have decided to partake in the highly respected and not-at-all cynical practice of fact-checking (just like CNN’s Daniel Dale does!).
- THE CLAIM -
President Donald Trump: “I think they [CNN] hate our country, actually.”
- OUR VERDICT -
- THE EVIDENCE -
Let’s consider the above video, which I put together in about 15 minutes by hunting down a few clips purely from memory. While the rhetoric contained in the video is unquestionably anti-American, we must consider what each speaker’s relationship with CNN actually is.
First, Tom Verni, who smugly declared America “a racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic, antisemitic country,” was not, and has never been, a paid CNN contributor. While the network invited him on to share exactly the kind of trash insight he offered in the clip, they can’t be considered wholly culpable for his bad opinions.
Similarly, Tiffany Cross, who declared that America was “never great,” is not a CNN contributor. Rather, she is a former MSNBC host who was given Joy Reid’s old weekend time slot after Reid was elevated to the 7:00 p.m. Eastern slot on weeknights. However, Cross did used to work for CNN as an associate producer back during the Bush years, so it could be argued that the network is a little more culpable for her her awful commentary than they were for Verni’s.
By contrast, CNN completely owns the midwitted, Howard Zinn-inspired “insights” of ostensible reporter Leyla Santiago, who was on the network’s payroll. CNN not only sanctioned her Sociology 101-level commentary about stolen land and slavery, they actually continued to pay her for it afterwards, and she remained in their employ until 2023.
They also own the commentary of correspondent and open-borders activist Rosa Flores, who absurdly declared that illegal aliens arriving in the U.S. were discovering that the American dream was “all a lie.”
And of course, W. Kamau Bell, who brilliantly deduced that America would remain irredeemably racist until the government started giving black people (but really just him) free money, was the host of one of those weekend shows that most people don’t know exists. But Bell’s United Shades of America, obscure though it may have been, was nonetheless a real CNN show, which technically makes him a real former CNN host.
All told, two of the five morons in this video are current or recent CNN TV reporters, one is a previous CNN host, one is a past CNN employee (to be generous, we can say she only counts for half), and one is a former cop who presumably wandered onto the set by accident. So of the five clips in this video, about three and a half of them were CNN-original commentary. In other words, 70 percent — a C-minus, but still a passing grade.
Thus, as long as CNN’s paid, on-air employees can be said to speak for their network, it’s safe to say that CNN does, at least somewhat, hate America.
