Ex-CNN Contributor Steve Cortes Claims ‘Rude’ Network Constantly Lied to Him

CNN “constantly” misled former contributor Steve Cortes in an effort to undermine his appearances on the network, Cortes said in a new interview.

He made the comment in an interview with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow, who asked Cortes how CNN treated him.

“Honestly? Terribly, just to put it bluntly,” the former CNN contributor replied. “I’ll give you an example of the dishonesty to be specific. They would send out notes before the show, and this is very typical for really any show, certainly in cable news or any news show, period. You send out notes to everybody who’s going to be involved in the segment. ‘Here are the topics we’re going to discuss. Here are sound bites we’re going to play,’ and that’s just normal standard operating procedure. I worked for Fox News before CNN. I am now a host at Newsmax. The same note at normal networks goes to everybody, OK? You don’t edit the note. You don’t send out two different versions.”

“At CNN, there were two different versions,” he said. “There was one sent to everybody else, and then one sent to me, and the one sent to me didn’t have very much information, or it would have incorrect information. ‘We’re going to talk about X,’ when in fact, we’re going to actually talk about Y. They would always claim, ‘Oh, that was a mistake.’ It wasn’t a mistake. It was clear.”

Cortes presently co-hosts a Newsmax program, Cortes & Pellegrino. He served as a CNN contributor until January 2020, but said the network released him for producing a five-minute PragerU video defending then-President Donald Trump for remarks he made about unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Even though I worked for them, it was this weird situation where I was being paid by CNN, and yet they were constantly trying to make me look foolish,” he added in his interview with Marlow. “They never succeeded, thankfully. I just did my homework. Most of the time, by the way, could you could relatively well guess what they were going to talk about, whatever they thought was most embarrassing to President Trump that day. But the tactics behind the scenes were even more dishonest than what you see on screen, which is saying something because what you see on screen is pretty risible.”

CNN did not respond to a request for comment from Mediaite.