CNN Called Out for Presenting Pro-Trump Activists as Regular Voters. This Isn’t Even the First Time.

CNN Called Out for Presenting Pro-Trump Activists as Regular Voters. This Isn’t Even the First Time.

Would your average cable news viewer be surprised to learn that Republican activists still support Donald Trump even after his latest racist tirade against four Democratic congresswomen? Of course not.

But if you are CNN and you simply label a panel of such activists as plain old Republican voters, perhaps you think it is a much more interesting story.

So that is what the network did on Tuesday, asking a panel of eight Trump-supporting women if the newest blow-up had changed their minds about the president. What the network failed to mention is that this was anything but a random focus group. Most if not all of these women, in fact, are committed Republican activists, as multiple writers and journalists immediately noticed:


But CNN’s Anderson Cooper described them as simply part of Trump’s base. Reporter Randi Kaye described them as “eight Republican women from Dallas.” The overall effect was to diminish the fact that these are hardcore Republican activists who are unlikely to abandon this president under any circumestances.

As documented by Parker Molloy of Media Matters, this is not the first time CNN has presented a panel of Trump voters without mentioning that they are hardcore Republican activists. In fact, it’s not even the first time they have used some of the same women for a panel. Kaye interviewed at least two of the same women in January of 2018, a year after Trump’s inauguration, about the exact same subject:

After the panel segment, Anderson Cooper spoke with Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and CNN political director David Chalian about how “depressing” he finds the current state of politics, where even such blatant racism as Trump demonstrated this week could not diminish his support from Republican women. Perhaps Cooper should try asking some who were not party activists, because that could make a difference.

Watch the clip above, via CNN.

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *