This week, CNN chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto claimed that billionaire Elon Musk’s conversation with former president Donald Trump was “not an interview” because Musk has endorsed Trump and donated to his campaign.
But Musk didn’t promote his discussion with Trump as an interview, explicitly saying that he simply wanted a free-wheeling conversation. When pressed on how this definition could be used against CNN, Sciutto claimed that he and his colleagues “ask hard questions of both parties.”
That remains to be seen. Multiple studies have shown that journalists who donate to political causes and politicians are far more likely to donate to Democrats. This bias is evident in the ranks of mainstream media outlets. For example, CNN anchor and pundit John Avlon is currently running as a Democrat in New York’s 1st Congressional District. MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez is the daughter of convicted felon and soon-to-be former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). NBC News briefly hired Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton, as a correspondent in 2011.
A Daily Wire review of FEC records found no evidence that CNN anchors who have interviewed Trump have donated to Democrats – at least not to any organization that requires public reporting of such donations. But their treatment of the former president is essentially a de facto endorsement of his opponents.
Here are some of the many, many examples of Sciutto’s network and others treating Trump more harshly than Biden or any other Democrat.
Jim Sciutto
Sciutto, who was chief of staff for then-Ambassador to China Gary Locke during the Obama administration, has used his X account to attack Trump and defend President Joe Biden. For example, on May 8, Sciutto claimed Trump halted Ukraine aid “for an explicit and personal political favor,” while claiming Biden threatening to halt aid to Israel was merely “over differences over the conduct of the war.”
Sciutto’s tweets about Biden and Democrats are usually statements of praise or defense, such as a comment from June 16, 2021, where Sciutto said “Biden looked Putin in the eyes, Putin immediately looked away,” above a photo of Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands.
In his defense, Sciutto has never interviewed Trump.
Kaitlan Collins
Collins’ ascension at CNN (after a stint as The Daily Caller’s entertainment reporter) has been marked by biased decisions.
On November 26, 2020, Collins posted a selfie with other CNN reporters bragging about being part of the “crew that got President Trump to answer his first questions in over three weeks.” As others noted at the time, neither Collins nor anyone else from CNN bragged about getting Biden to answer a single question as he and Vice President Kamala Harris continued to largely avoid taking questions from reporters.
Collins also apparently rose through the ranks quickly at CNN thanks to her role as a White House reporter who annoyed Trump with her hostile questions.
Wolf Blitzer
Blitzer’s wife donated $250 to the Democratic National Committee in 1996, campaign finance records show. But Blitzer has come under fire for bias. CNN pundit Scott Jennings blasted Blitzer for saying “both sides” needed to cool rhetoric after an assassination attempt was made on Trump. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton excoriated Blitzer for pushing a New York Times-based conspiracy theory that the “Appeal to Heaven” flag – which was designed by George Washington’s private secretary and commissioned for use in the Continental Navy in 1775 — was somehow a symbol of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots.
Jake Tapper
Tapper, who began his career working for Democratic Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (now Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law), has used language comparing Trump to Hitler.
In December 2023, Tapper said, “Trump, a couple of times over the weekend, referred to immigrants from South America, Africa, and Asia, he did not mention Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia as ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ which if it’s not hyperbole, that does very directly echo Adolf Hitler’s language before World War II, before the Holocaust.”
He also said, “If you would open up a copy of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as poisoning. … There’s really no other way to say it. Donald Trump’s language mirrors this directly.”
As The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro pointed out in June, Tapper and fellow CNN host Dana Bash had the following exchange after the first debate between Trump and Biden in 2020:
Tapper: That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace. And it’s primarily because of President Trump, who spent the entire time interrupting, not abiding by the rules he agreed to, lying, maliciously attacking the son of the Vice President.
Dana Bash: You just took the words out of my mouth. You used some high-minded language. I’m just going to say it like it is: that was a s***show!
Tapper: The President does not think he’s going to win this election. And he wants to bring the rest of us down with him.
He also said, after Trump lost re-election, that the “long national nightmare is over” for tens of millions of his “fellow” Americans.
Dana Bash
Dana Bash’s ex-husband, Jeremy Bash, gave hundreds to Democrat candidates and organizations during their marriage. After Biden’s 2024 State of the Union speech, Bash praised Biden, “They wanted him to be a fighter, and, boy, a fight did he deliver.”
Just this week, Bash was caught lying about what billionaire Elon Musk and Trump discussed on X. Bash played a deceptively edited clip giving the implication that Musk and Trump simply said bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t bad, when they were discussing that in the larger context of nuclear power and its benefits and dangers.
Sen. J.D. Vance recently called out Bash for defending Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, after it was shown he has been misleading people about his military service.
Bash also complimented a response from Biden that proved to be false. When four hostages were released from Russia in August, a reporter asked Biden about Trump’s claim that he would get the hostages released if he was elected in November, to which Biden asked why Trump didn’t get the hostages out when he was president. Bash commented: “I think that was what they call a ‘mic drop’ moment.”
Only one of those hostages had been taken during Trump’s administration.
Anderson Cooper
Cooper’s on-air commentary also skews toward Democrats, like his 2020 comment that the Trump re-election campaign was “like a clown car on fire.”
Cooper also has criticized Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate, asking a guest in July if he thought the Trump campaign was “having any buyer’s remorse,” after the media reshared old videos of Vance’s comments.
Cooper has not asked such a question following Harris’ selection of Walz as her running mate.
Cooper has also compared the January 6 Capitol Hill riots to the Rwandan genocide, which saw 800,000 people murdered.
“Part of it, I think, just based on what you were just saying, it comes to mind, the idea of otherizing people is something I think we saw a lot of over the last four years. I mean, certainly we’ve seen a lot over the last decades, but it’s so easy to otherize people, to make people other than, other than American, other than patriotic, other than human,” Cooper said in February 2021. “You know, and we’ve seen it in Bosnia, we’ve seen it in Rwanda, where radio was telling people that you know, Hutus, were telling the radio listeners that Tutsi were cockroaches for you know, getting them ginned up for genocide.”
George Stephanopoulos
Stephanopoulos, ABC’s top political anchor, came under fire in 2015 after it was discovered that he failed to disclose a $75,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation. Stephanopoulos, who previously worked as President Bill Clinton’s White House communications director and senior advisor, had a long history of supporting Democrats and undermining Republicans. In 2024, he said it was “journalistic malpractice” to air live television interviews with Trump, even though he’s currently running for president. Trump is also suing Stephanopoulos for defamation after the anchor falsely claimed Trump had been found “liable for rape.”
Rachel Scott
The ABC reporter who went viral last month for her hostile question toward Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Conference was a White House intern under President Barack Obama.
Margaret Brennan
On July 13 — the day Trump was shot by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania — Brennan disparaged Trump for not immediately making a “call for lowering the temperature.” She also berated him for not “condemning all political violence, and really trying to signal to his supporters as well not to retaliate or to have any kind of escalation.”
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