CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump remains at the forefront of the news media consciousness, and former cable news host Keith Olbermann continues to share his displeasure with the network, and now Anderson Cooper.
“The journalistic malfeasance was so thorough, the internal staff rage so vituperative, and the on-air ratings so underwhelming, that if Anderson Cooper, or Wolf Blitzer, or Jake Tapper, or all of them went into the office of Chris Licht’s boss this afternoon and said that the Trump Town Hall was the final straw and it had damaged theirs and the network’s credibility and they were walking out, Licht would be gone from CNN by Monday,” the Countdown with Keith Olbermann host said to begin Friday’s podcast. “It was that bad.”
Olbermann then turned his criticism to Cooper, who began his program Thursday evening by sharing his understanding of complaints directed at CNN, but defended the decision to air a Trump town hall by arguing “Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”
“He directed his infamous and long-standing condescension to his own audience, or whatever was left of it after the Trump debacle,” Olbermann shared. “Now, he said, maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office, thinking it can’t happen again. Anderson Cooper’s premise that to understand Trump and the threat he poses we have to approve of CNN as capitulation to and collaboration with him is absurd, indefensible, and sanctimonious.
“Instead of using his platform to bravely recognize that the threat of Trump is paralleled within CNN by the threat of Chris Licht and the conservatives he’s prostituted the network for instead of showing just some guts, Anderson Cooper decided to try to guilt whoever was left to watch CNN last night. I worked with Anderson Cooper at CNN in 2001 and 2002, and I never got his appeal then or since,” continued Olbermann.
“To me, he has been a living, breathing marketing experiment, a failed marketing experiment. The ratings have reflected that. This attack on his own viewers confirmed that. Shame on him.”
