Former CNN host Soledad O’Brien is sick and tired of cable news networks giving Donald Trump‘s White supremacist surrogates airtime.
On Sunday’s edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, the journalist didn’t hold back her discontent with how the media covers the GOP presidential nominee. Looking at Trump’s current ties to the Alt Right, O’Brien said the media’s current approach “normalizes” White supremacy by hosting Trump surrogates who are White supremacists, a move O’Brien believes is about making a profit and “contortions to make things seem equal all the time” between covering Trump and Hillary Clinton, Uproxx noted.
“If you look at Hillary Clinton’s speech [on why Trump’s policies are racist] she basically pointed out that what Donald Trump has done — actually quite well — has normalized White supremacy,” O’Brien explained to CNN host Brian Stelter. “I think she made a very good argument, almost like a lawyer. Here are ways in which he has actually worked to normalize conversations that many people find hateful.”
“I’ve seen White supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates. And they do a five-minute segment, the first minute or so talking about what they believe as White supremacists. So you have normalized that,” she stressed.
She also sounded off on Trump’s unsubstantiated beliefs that Clinton is a bigot — and how the media failed to cover it correctly.
“And then Donald Trump will say, ‘Hillary Clinton, she’s a bigot.’ And it’s covered, the journalist part comes in, ‘They trade barbs. He said she’s a bigot and she points out that he might be appealing to racists.’ It only becomes ‘he said, she said.’ When in actuality, the fact that Donald Trump said she’s a bigot without the long laundry list of evidence, which if you looked at Hillary Clinton’s speech, she actually did have a lot of really good factual evidence that we would all agree that are things that have happened and do exist. They are treated as if they are equal,” she added.
O’Brien is also concerned about the effects this type of coverage has on Americans and how it will impact the future of cable news.
“So hateful speech brings a really interested, angry audience,” she noted. “This is genius! We should do this more often. What shall we do when this election is over? We’re going to have to think about ways to really rile people up, make them angry and divide them.
“Now, it is ‘he said, she said’ all the time. We have lost context. We actually don’t even cover the details of something. We just cover the back and forth of it. It’s funny to watch if it weren’t our own country and our own government actually operating,” she concluded.
Tell ’em, Soledad!
SOURCE: Uproxx | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty | VIDEO CREDIT: YouTube
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