(Headline USA) Leftist media shill Christiane Amanpour became the most recent CNN correspondent to publicly criticize her network for airing last week’s town hall with former President Donald Trump, broadcasting her own biases at the commencement ceremony of what many consider to be the nation’s foremost graduate program for journalism.
“I can only hope that your trust in us might have been shaken but not shattered, that you believe that we can survive and rebuild that trust,” she told a group of graduating students at Columbia University journalism school on Wednesday.
The remarks came as many of CNN’s dedicated propagandists struggle with the new realities of a paradigm shift under new network head Chris Licht, who has signaled that he wants to bring the original 24-hour cable-news channel back to its roots of reporting over opinion, advocacy and punditry.
Already Licht has laid off at least two of the network’s most outspoken political hacks, Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, while scrambling to pull up CNN’s basement-level ratings against competitors Fox News, MSNBC and even the conservative upstart Newsmax.
Licht has defended the town hall as newsworthy and important, and Amanpour said she had a “robust discussion” with him about it.
Instead, Amanpour likened the modern media’s effort to silence and blacklist conservatives to the effort to struggle in the 1950s when conservative lawmakers sought to silence and blacklist communists, suggesting the extreme leftists were part of a noble struggle in both cases.
She said today’s journalism leaders should learn from those in the 1950s, who refused to give Sen. Joseph McCarthy attention “unless his foul lies, his witch hunts and his rants” reached the basic level for evidence allowed in a courtroom.
“Maybe less is more,” she said. “Maybe live is not always right.”
Ironically, her remarks also were delivered in the same week as the release of the Durham report detailing the outright falsity of the Trump–Russia collusion hoax that CNN and other outlets spent several years pushing, despite its failure to meet any evidentiary standard.
Amanpour likewise celebrated the disruptive and disrespectful effort by moderator Kaitlan Collins as she sought to talk over Trump and fact check his every word, saying said she would have “dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’” a reference to when Trump lobbed that insult at Collins.
Amanpour, the chief international correspondent who has worked at CNN for 40 years, insisted that everyone knows Trump tries to seize the stage and dominate at such events.
“No matter how much flak the moderator tries to aim at the incoming, it doesn’t work,” she said.
Amanpour also criticized the town hall’s audience, chosen by CNN because they were Republicans or independents who plan to vote in the 2024 Republican primary.
Citing the precedents of past candidate debates or forums, CNN should have insisted “that our invited guests behave themselves—no hooting, no hollering, no jeering, no cheering.”
A spokesman for Licht did not immediately return messages for comment. In an internal call with CNN staff members last week, Licht noted that people in the town hall audience represented a large swath of America.
“The mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist,” he said. “Just like you cannot ignore that President Trump exists.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
