Gutfeld on the media and the virus
Media pundits tear into President Trump's coronavirus briefings.
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CNN anchor Jake Tapper made a questionable retweet Monday night of a post saying that President Trump was "100 percent insane."
First spotted by Media Research Center news analyst Nicholas Fondacaro, the tweet was made by vocal Trump critic George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who was responding to tweet slamming the president during the coronavirus task force press briefing.
The tweet essentially said that nobody in the Trump administration had the guts to tell Trump that he is "100% insane."
"There's really not a lot of middle ground," Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffrey wrote. Conway echoed her sentiment and Tapper later retweeted to his over 2.3 million Twitter followers.
Fondacaro shared a screenshot of the retweet and slammed CNN's prominent political anchor.
"This is the kind of crap @jaketapper retweets. He's not a journalist, he's an anti-Trump activist," Fondacaro reacted.
The next morning, the "State of the Union" anchor appeared to have undone the retweet and quote-tweeted Conway instead, adding "Noteworthy comment on folks in the administration from a Trump critic who knows a lot of them."
But Tapper later defended the retweet he undid while responding to criticism from George Washington Univerity Law Professor Jonathan Turley, who said Tapper's retweet "further undermines the media by reaffirming for many that the media is campaigning against Trump rather than covering him."
"I RTed Conway, a conservative attorney and Trump critic, because he wrote that no one in the administration has the courage to stand up to the president which seems newsworthy given how many people in the administration he knows. RTs do not nec. = agreement," Tapper replied on Tuesday.
CNN did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
The liberal network has become known in recent years for its news anchors and journalists to openly express contempt towards President Trump. Hours earlier, Tapper's colleague Anderson Cooper accused the president of "hijacking" his own White House press briefing and called his response to the coronavirus outbreak "reprehensibly irresponsible."
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"If you tuned into it hoping you were going to hear from the country's top scientists, you were likely disappointed," Cooper began his anti-Trump rant. "What you mostly heard was the president. And what you saw was a hijacking. A hijacking of the task force press conference by a president determined to rewrite the history of his early and reprehensibly irresponsible response to this virus. What the president showed us today is what the nation's top scientists have to deal with every day- a president who now uses these briefings as a reelection platform, an opportunity to lie, to deflect, to attack, to bully, and cover-up his own deadly dismissals of the virus for crucial weeks."
Last week, "CNN Tonight" anchor Don Lemon urged the network not to carry the briefings live since Trump is "never, ever going to tell you the truth."
"I have said I don't think that you should really listen to what he says, you should listen to what the experts say," Lemon told his primetime colleague Chris Cuomo during their nightly handoff. "I'm not actually sure, if you want to be honest, that we should carry that live. I think we should run snippets. I think we should do it afterwards and get the pertinent points to the American people because he's never, ever going to tell you the truth."
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He continued, "It is all a plot! It is all orchestrated. And if you can't see it, I don't know what you're looking at. It's obvious, it's transparent to me. This has become- those press briefings have become his new 'Apprentice.' They've become his new rallies. And he treats the press and the media as if he's talking to the people at his rallies. It's the same thing. It's no different except the audience isn't there."
Lemon's plea was apparently heard loud and clearly because the next day, the anti-Trump network began skipping the president's prepared remarks at the top of his daily coronavirus briefings.
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