CNN’s John Berman Manipulatively Rephrases Kellyanne Conway to Make Her Point Worse

The top topic of the week is the separation of children from their parents by our government as a direct result of specific Trump administration policy.

It is an extremely unpopular policy that is under fire from nearly every direction, and easily criticized without resorting to sarcastic, fake questions designed to put words in someone’s mouth. But that didn’t stop John Berman.

On Monday evening, Kellyanne Conway and Chris Cuomo duked it out in a disastrous interview that went totally off the rails. On CNN’s New Day on Tuesday morning, Berman replayed the clip before summarizing Conway’s, and therefore Donald Trump’s position on the issue in Berman’s own words.

“Kellyanne Conway was on with Chris Cuomo last night,” he began, “and she’s saying it’s not about these parents being separated from these children at the border, it’s about the crime that is committed, at times, by undocumented immigrants in the United States.”

He then played a seconds of clip from the interview, showing Kellyanne asking Cuomo whether he has played the audio of parents crying at night over their children who were killed by people here illegally.

Berman then sums it up in a fake question for his guest.

“So.. he is suggesting that these crimes that have been committed in the United States by undocumented immigrants — somehow, I guess, the 4-year-olds, the 6 year-olds in custody at the border right now are responsible for that?” he asks with mock confusion.

That, of course, is not what Conway said, and is not even a serious interpretation of what she said.

Conway was obviously specifically addressing a moment at the beginning of the interview, a clip that Berman did not play, where Cuomo played audio of children at the border crying for their parents. In their exchange, Conway brought up victims of crimes and pointedly asked Cuomo why, if everyone’s suffering mattered and was important, he hadn’t played the parents of murdered children crying. Here are the clips:

This is powerful footage that stands on its own. These are kids crying for their parents, separated and detained in a strange place by our own government. Chris Cuomo, a professional, plays that and knows it speaks for itself.

Here is the exchange which Berman samples.

Kellyanne’s argument may be manipulative or, as Cuomo says, a bad analogy, but it’s beyond dishonest of John Berman to completely rephrase her, using a tiny sample, to say she argued 4-year-olds a thousand miles away and years later are responsible for crimes committed by someone else. He knows that’s not what she said, his guest knows that, the cohosts know that.

The pretend question comes off as blatantly self-indulgent, rather than critical or deliberative, which is no small thing if you’re driving people to a bubble on another network.

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