LEMON DROP | FAKE-ISH NEWS?
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The long national nightmare is over. That is how my former colleague Jake Tapper described the end of Trump's first term. That was mere moments after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. And then Jake went on to call Trump's four years in the White House. And I quote here. A time of cruelty, a time when truth and fact were treated with disdain and an error of just plain meanness. Now, it was a journalistic tour de force, I have to admit, unrelenting in its honesty. Take a listen. Here it is.
It's been a time of several significant and utterly avoidable failures, most tragically. Of course, the unwillingness to respect facts and science and do everything that can be done to save lives during a pandemic. It has been a time where truth and fact were treated with disdain It is a time of cruelty where official inhumanity, such as child separation, became the official shameful policy of the United States. But now the Trump presidency is coming to an end. to an end with so many squandered opportunities and ruined potential, but also an era of just plain meanness. It must be said, to paraphrase President Ford, for tens of millions of our fellow Americans, their long national nightmare is over.
Bravo, Jake. Not many that day had the courage of their convictions to speak the plain truth. Trump was still contesting the election. He was claiming he was the rightful winner. He was already asserting, and falsely I should add, that he had evidence, that he had evidence proving that the results were fraudulent. That monologue made me feel proud to be a journalist. It made me proud that we have dedicated our lives to speaking truth to power. And all of this is why recent reporting by another one of my former colleagues, Oliver Darcy, why it caught my eye. According to Oliver, on Sunday afternoon, one day before Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 47th president, CNN's top journalist convened for an editorial meeting led by the network chief, who is Mark Thompson.
Now, during the meeting, Oliver says, which was held virtually. It was attended by Anderson, Jake, and where Thompson offered guidance about how he wanted to see the network cover Inauguration Day. So Thompson reportedly, again, according to Oliver, told attendees that he wanted his journalists to be, quote, forward thinking and to avoid, and I quote again here, prejudging Trump. He cautioned against expressing any, another quote, outrage. Now, according to Darcy, Thompson signaled that he did not wish to see the network focus on Trump's record as a convicted felon or the fact that he exited office as a twice impeached and disgraced president. Now, if you watched CNN's coverage of the inauguration, I want you to tell me if it seemed different to you.
Here's a little bit of it here. This is CNN's special live coverage of the inauguration of Donald Trump. I'm Anderson Cooper in our studio in Washington, D.C.
And I'm Jake Tapper overlooking the White House that will soon be the Trump White House once again. The president-elect on the verge of sealing his unprecedented political comeback, opening the door to radical and immediate change here in Washington, D.C. and across the country.
So to me, that is a slightly different change in tone, especially from Tapper, who had been so clear the other time. And I want to be clear here as well. This is not a critique of Jake Tapper. This isn't a critique of CNN, okay? It's easy to see how Americans, though, might come away with the perception that corporate media writ large is working to accommodate the second Trump presidency. Think about how Jeff Bezos nixed the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Think about how the LA Times... They're hiring a host of MAGA colonists. Think about ABC News settling Donald Trump's defamation suit against George Stephanopoulos. Think about how some journalists and anchors are making pilgrimages down to Mar-a-Lago to make nice with Donald Trump.
There are a number of examples. So mark my words, corporate media is going to cover Donald Trump's second administration in a starkly different manner than they did his first.
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