Radio host Charlamagne tha God slammed CNN’s coverage of Donald Trump for centering the “wrong conversation” and choosing to “sprinkle some MAGA” in to boost revenue during a segment directly before his Tuesday phone interview with Kamala Harris.
On his podcast The Breakfast Club, Charlamagne was criticizing the network’s coverage of Trump’s hate-laden Madison Square Garden rally, in which comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“The first issue is what they choose to center and how they choose to center it,” he said. “I was watching CNN yesterday, and I’m not gonna say the anchor’s name, but they were talking about the MAGA rally at the Garden, and they were talking about it like it was just normal.”
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He generalized the experience to CNN’s overall coverage of Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.
“We’re almost 10 years into the Trump era, and they still don’t know how to cover that demon,” Charlamagne said. “Or the blatant white supremacy that comes from anyone associated with him, OK? It’s strange. In between talking about the MAGA rally like it was virtually normal, the host was still asking one of the pundits on the panel if Vice President Kamala Harris should do Joe Rogan. It was very strange. But that’s what a lot of these cable news networks do. And I see it a lot more on CNN. They have a problem making the main thing the main thing. They always center the wrong conversation. And by doing that, they have assisted in the normal normalization of Donald Trump’s fascism.”
The popular radio host said his other issue with CNN was that its cross-aisle panel conversations lacked “good faith.” Charlamagne referenced an incident Monday in which a conservative panelist implied that a Muslim panelist was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah after he said he supported Palestine.
“I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” Ryan Girdusky told Mehdi Hasan, alluding to Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah members last month by detonating explosives planted in the group’s pagers. Girdusky was removed from the roundtable discussion and later banned from appearing on CNN.
To Charlamagne, the incident was emblematic of a recurring issue on the network.
“They will have a conservative who’s not there to have a good faith discussion,” he said. “And whatever it is the panel is discussing, the conservative will just say something wild and derail the whole conversation. So then everybody forgets what they were even discussing to begin with.”
Charlamagne said his concerns, which are also issues at other cable news networks, stem from the fact the channels are “all about ratings and revenue.”
“MAGA makes money,” he said. “So CNN has decided to sprinkle some MAGA on it, OK? They’re like Salt Bae, whoever the leadership is at the top. They are just sprinkling that Old MAGA Bay seasoning all over CNN.”
But he maintained that there are “still a few good hosts out there who actually care about using their platform to inform and forewarn the American people about the dangers of Donald Trump.”
Immediately after the segment, Charlamagne dipped his toes into the political news cycle, interviewing Harris exactly a week out from Election Day. She took the opportunity to rebuke billionaire Jeff Bezos for canceling The Washington Post’s presidential endorsement.
