For CNN, "purist" Republicans are daring to shut down the government to defund Obamacare while those Republicans trying to dissuade them are "pragmatists."
New Day co-host Kate Bolduan borrowed from the New York Times to play her label game. "Yeah, and I think the New York Times put it pretty well. It's the difference between the purists and the pragmatists. And there's that struggle in the party right now."
In a show of advocacy and not journalism, CNN skirted the policy details of the student loans debate and instead just paddled Congress for letting the loan rates double, on Monday's New Day.
Co-hosts Kate Bolduan and Chris Cuomo begged Congress to "fix" the student loan rate increase that automatically went into effect on July 1. They dubbed it the "'Come on Congress' campaign." Cuomo scolded Congress: "This student loans thing, we want to be on it just about every day. They can fix it. They know it was a mistake. You can't compromise education in the country, not this way."
17 hours after CNN first reported that the IRS targeted liberal groups as well as conservative groups, it finally offered the Republican side of the story, that Tea Party groups received even more scrutiny than "progressive" and "Occupy" groups.
Correspondent Dana Bash first broke the story during Monday's 5 p.m. ET hour of The Situation Room that according to a document dump, the IRS included groups with the terms "progressive" and "Occupy" along with Tea Party groups in its "Be On the Lookout" watch list. What Bash failed to note is that, according to one 2010 list, information on Tea Party groups was still instructed to be sent to higher authorities in Washington D.C. for further scrutiny.
Before Monday morning's debut of the Cable News Network's New Day three-hour program, co-host Chris Cuomo was interviewed by Sam Thielman of Adweek.com in a discussion that ranged from his career choice of journalism over politics to his “tendency to advocate more than people are used to on television.”
Speaking of himself and co-hosts Kate Bolduan and Michaela Pereira, the 42-year-old newsman stated: “We take our jobs very seriously here at New Day, but we do not take ourselves very seriously. If it matters to people, it matters to us.”
I presume everyone remembers how when the New York Times published information about a classified program designed to track the movement of alleged terrorist funding through the international banking system Bush administration officials threatened to prosecute Times reporters and management over what they had done? No you don't, because although some conservatives and Republicans thought it might be a worth considering it didn't happen. You can guarantee that if it had, it would have become a TV-radio-newspaper-Internet establishment press obsession for days on end.
Tonight, Washington Post's Bob Woodward alleged that because he is sticking to his guns in insisting that sequestration was the brainchild of the Obama White House, that it was personally approved by Obama, and that bringing up tax increases now to try to resolve the current sequestration impasse is "moving the goalposts," he has been threatened by "a very senior person" in the White House. Woodward said so on CNN's Situation Room earlier today. What's even more troubling is that Woodward told two Politico reporters the same thing yesterday, and that they appear to have sat on the revelation until this evening when the CNN interview forced their hand. Relevant portions of the CNN transcript and Politico column follow the jump.
After CNN correspondent Jim Acosta felt like pinching himself at Monday's inauguration parade, host Wolf Blitzer couldn't contain himself as he tried to get the attention of both President Obama and Vice President Biden.
Blitzer gushed that "Look, this is history over here," as the President and First Lady made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. He waved to Obama saying "Mr. President," but was drowned out by crowd noise. Blitzer did the same with Vice President Biden.
For the second straight day, CNN blew the whistle on a nasty and misleading Obama super PAC ad that ABC, CBS, and NBC entirely ignored as of Wednesday night. CNN hammered the ad, which links Mitt Romney to a woman's death from cancer, each hour from 6 p.m. through 10 p.m. and twice grilled the man responsible for the ad, Bill Burton of Priorities USA.
"I think it is deliberately mendacious," stated CNN's Piers Morgan on Wednesday. "It is a deliberate attempt to lie and smear about Mitt Romney. And I find it contemptible. I mean I'm really appalled." The three networks showed no such disdain for the ad which will air in battleground states, because they failed to even mention it on Tuesday and Wednesday.
CNN associated a white supremacist neo-Nazi band with the political right-wing as it labeled the punk rock band of Wisconsin shooter Wade Michael Page as "far right."
CNN had reported Page's band named "End Apathy" as "white supremacist," "neo-Nazi," and as a "hate group." Yet it also repeatedly labeled it "far right" on Sunday and Monday.
After the Obama administration announced Friday it will not deport young illegal immigrants that meet certain criteria, CNN's first interview went to an immigration rights leader who raved to the network that "Today is, I think, the happiest day of my life."
The activist, Gabby Pacheco, appeared in the Time magazine illegal immigration cover story that CNN featured multiple times on Thursday, and herself noted that the DHS announcement was timely in light of the magazine cover hitting stands on Thursday.
When the news pertains to issues in the Catholic church, CNN loves to promote liberal theologians and religious, especially ones that are defying Catholic teaching. In contrast, orthodox priests and bishops might receive vastly different treatment – if they even get on CNN, that is.
So when an American nun's book on sexual ethics was found by the Vatican to be "not in conformity" with the Catholic Church's teaching, CNN contributor Stephen Prothero smacked the Vatican for its "unjust" condemnation of the book and accused the Catholic Church of continuing to "attack the sort of apple pie, mom kind of institutions in America."
In light of Monday's school shooting in Ohio, CNN hyped the alarm of gun control activists over the repeal of a Virginia handgun regulation, and also evoked the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre where 33 students lost their lives.
CNN's Kate Bolduan interviewed the father of a victim of the Tech shooting and asked him about his opposition to the handgun limit's repeal. She gave him a sympathetic interview but hosted no one from the other side to argue in favor of overturning the law.
Despite the cost of the auto bailout to taxpayers, CNN hailed the subsequent resurfacing of GM as a "pretty amazing" feat and took a jab at the original opponents of the bailout, which included current presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Thursday's John King, USA featured fill-in host Kate Bolduan and business correspondent Ali Velshi wagging their fingers at Romney and the naysayers.
"And, by the way, Kate, I know you didn't ask me the question, but those people who fought against the auto bailout a couple of years ago kind of have egg on their faces right now," Velshi quipped.