CNN anchor Chris Cuomo granted an interview to The Hollywood Reporter to plug his temporary prime-time show, expressing his eagerness to "test power" with aggressive face-to-face interviews, like his usual marathons badgering Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. When Jeremy Barr asked about how even current and former Fox hosts questioned the brilliance of a Trump lawyer suing to cease and desist publication of the Michael Wolff book, Cuomo said they weren't really journalists:
THR: Some conservative media personalities, like Fox News' Tucker Carlson and Bill O'Reilly, have questioned why Trump threatened a lawsuit over the book. They think he just drew more attention to the book.
CHRIS CUOMO: They give him cover by disingenuously attacking the media for doing its job. They are pandering to a very specific audience that is now called "the base," where they are attacking the media for doing its job because they have skin in the game, in terms of wanting a conservative agenda discussed, wanting it seen in glowing terms. So, they are not fair brokers of what's going on. And that's OK. The media has room for everybody. They're pundits, not journalists, and that's what they do.
So was Cuomo not a journalist when he described Obama in glowing terms? Obama swatted a fly in the middle of a TV interview and Cuomo gushed as he used a Telestrator to draw on the screen: "Look at the hand coming up. The poise. The cupping. And the quick slap....He's very quick....The President has cat-like quickness."
Somehow CNN doesn't have a "base," which is strange considering they pound anti-Trump narratives from sunrise to sunset. Cuomo thinks he's a journalist now because he yells at Republicans: "Why aren't you saying the President is acting like an emperor?"
When asked how Fox covered the Trump administration in its first year, Cuomo declared Fox and MSNBC made a choice to be obviously partisan...as if CNN was the epitome of fairness and balance, as well as "super relevant" in the Trump era:
They've made a very obvious choice about what they want to do. And MSNBC has made an obvious choice as well. And they are within their rights to do that, and the audience gets to decide. That's the beautiful thing about this business. ... Everybody's got to make their choices. You decide to work where you feel you're best suited to doing the job the way you want to do it. That's why I came to CNN. I had a great gig at ABC News — great people, loved the work. But I wasn't able to do what I would be able to do here. I didn't know Trump was coming. I didn't know how super relevant we would be. And how important testing would be. But I got lucky in that regard, I suppose.
