Activism

Delta Sigma Theta’s Soledad O’Brien Blasts CNN For “Normalizing” White Supremacy When Reporting About Trump

Delta Sigma Theta’s Soledad O’Brien is not having it with the way cable news networks including CNN, her former employer, are making money off of the hate speech that is contributing to Donald Trump’s rise in politics.

On Sunday, O’Brien spoke with CNN’s Brian Stelter and Jacob Weisberg, the Chairman and editor-in-chief of The Slate Group about how she thinks the media has gone out of its way when comparing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to make “contortions to make things seem equal all the time.”

“I’ve seen on-air, white supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates,” she stated. “And they do a five minute segment, the first minute or so talking about what they believe as white supremacists. So you have normalized that.”

O’Brien said that journalists should be asking themselves if their stories and coverage is “softening the ground for people — who are white supremacists, who are white nationalists, who would self-identify that way — to feel comfortable with their views being brought into the national discourse to the point where they can do a five minute interview happily on national television?”

“And then Donald Trump will say, ‘Hillary Clinton, she’s a bigot.’ And it’s covered, the journalist part comes in, ‘They trade barbs. He said she’s a bigot and she points out that he might be appealing to racists.’ It only becomes ‘he said, she said.’ When in actuality, the fact that Donald Trump said she’s a bigot without the long laundry list of evidence, which if you looked at Hillary Clinton’s speech, she actually did have a lot of really good factual evidence that we would all agree that are things that have happened and do exist. They are treated as if they are equal.”

“So hateful speech brings a really interested, angry audience,” she stated. “This is genius! We should do this more often. What shall we do when this election is over? We’re going to have to think about ways to really rile people up, make them angry and divide them.”

Former CNN host, American broadcast journalist and executive producer, Soledad O’Brien is was inducted into Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. in 2011 at Howard University.

Watch her interview below: