Caitlin Collins

speaker

180 appearances 14 recordings 10 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 13 Feb

Caitlin Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour · Kaitlan Collins Is Not “Nasty”; She’s Just Doing Her Job · 21 Mar 2025 podcast

Well, on just the right in general, I think they're emboldened by Trump's win. Tucker obviously was running the Daily Caller when I was there.

He worked at Fox, but he didn't have a primetime show and wasn't the king of cable as he became and had TV that the White House felt was must-see television because whatever he was talking about that night in his monologue, Trump would likely be talking about the next day. That's what I heard from senior staff in the White House the last time.

He is someone who has worked at every cable outlet, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC throughout his career, and now is in this moment using his influence in a different way. And I think that is something that I've been watching as well with Trump is his moving away from the traditional, you know, kind of Rupert Murdoch-esque level of influence to the Elon Musk, Joe Rogan,

more right-wing podcasters kind of level of influence. We saw that during the campaign, which I thought was fascinating because I think if Rupert Murdoch had called Trump, as he did this time in 2016, and said, you should pick this person as your vice president, Trump probably would have picked them. But he did that this time and said, you should pick Doug Burgum, I think.

Maybe not explicitly, but this is what we were told. And Trump went with J.D. Vance. And I just thought that really said a lot about who Trump is listening to and how that landscape shift has even made it into his inner circle.

I was nervous, less because of the ideology, because I'm not ideological. Like I've always been a reporter and that has always been kind of my like driving force. And CNN is also just massive. But so quickly I realized, you know, these people only are interested in what I'm reporting. They don't care like where I came from. They're like, how can you use that in your sources?

to bring scoops here and to get reporting and to do a really good live shot. And that was actually really refreshing to me because I was bracing for people to maybe treat me differently when I started at CNN. And I remember like the announcement, people were like, what?

And it just, you know, within weeks of starting at CNN, I realized how helpful it was and that the sheer size of it was big, but also the resources were really helpful.

No, because I think actually it helped because they felt, you know, from their view, they had someone who kind of understood them. And a bigger platform. Well, that worked at CNN. And maybe they didn't have a lot of relationships with people there.

And also in the Trump White House, you know, the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Journal and cable news is like where his attention goes. And so people would bring stuff to TV reporters because they wanted to get it on TV. Yeah.

I'm still a human, obviously, like I have lived experiences and thoughts and views on things. But I don't think that I have strong ideological opinions when I go into a briefing or a press conference on certain things. And what I want to do is here's the reporting. Here it is.

And this is, you know, by apolitical and not biased, that doesn't mean that you're just saying it very mundane and straightforward. I'm saying here's the context and here's, you know, if you're being bullshitted, here's the answer to that. And you take with that what you will. You form your own opinion off of that.

Certainly, it's a very different operating environment than I think covering Biden or covering any other president, because they're much more in your face and will publicly say whatever. But I think, you know, as you're approaching that, you know, when you have these personal relationships with people, and a lot of them, again, I've known and reported on for eight years now, my...

perception, is they're much more hostile publicly than they are privately. And I think that speaks to Trump himself. I mean, he is that way as well. He's very critical publicly, but if he's doing it off the record or he'll come back to talk to the media, his view is different and his attitude is different. Now, does that mean they love us and they're telling us everything behind the scenes? No.

A lot of what you're doing as a reporter is trying to discern what's real, what's someone trying to knife somebody else, and what's the most accurate version of events that happened behind closed doors.

Don't you think you're getting ahead of the investigation right now?

That collision happened right before my show. And so we were the first show to cover it, really getting an understanding. That was when we found out that there were a lot of humans on board and probably none of them were alive. And we stayed on air till 2 a.m. that morning covering it. I got home, I woke up, and Trump was calling a press conference.

And so, you know, people's bodies were still being pulled out of the river. And a lot of their loved ones that I had been like talking to or texting with, they were still very much in the middle of that. And so for Trump to come out and immediately start blaming something when the investigation was hours old, I think those are moments where you have to have real clarity as a reporter of like...

what are the people watching this feeling and what is important to be called out and kind of say what everyone's thinking? And that was what I thought I did in that moment. As far as Trump, you know, I think he's someone who seeks the validation of the press as much as he criticizes them publicly. And so, you know, it doesn't really bother me when he gets upset at my question because...

Our job is to ask the questions. He can respond however he wants to respond. That is his prerogative. And it shouldn't influence really what you're asking or how you're asking it, in my view.

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