CNN’s Stelter Rips Trump for Cheering Anti-Lockdown Protesters Harassing Reporter: ‘Basic Decency Should Never Be Partisan’

CNN’s Brian Stelter ripped President Donald Trump on Sunday for how his war with the political press has fomented anger and aggression throughout the country.

Stelter used his Reliable Sources opening monologue to argue that the last three years of Trump’s presidency have proven his point that the latter’s feud with the media is “a verbal form of poison.” Stelter went thorough several of Trump’s most recent, aggressive slams on the press, but he especially focused on how the president egged on his supporters last week after they accosted local news reporter Kevin Vesey while he tried to cover their protests against coronavirus lockdown.

“The president is encouraging confrontations with reporters,” Stelter noted. “He’s saying it’s okay. He’s saying it’s patriotic, it’s Trumpian, to confront local TV reporters, to yell epithets while they’re trying to work, to act menacing in front of kids. It’s where we are. This is the kind of stuff you see in autrocracies, not democracies.”

Stelter continued by noting that there’s a cycle where reporters will apply critical coverage of Trump’s lies, then the president will use that to whip up his base with a nonstop escalation of hostilities toward the media.

“It is a vicious, vicious cycle, but basic decency is not and should never be partisan,” Stelter said.”By all means, constructive criticism is a good thing. It makes journalists better. Destructive attacks — shouting ‘traitor’ at reporters who are covering a protest, sending pictures of nooses to reporters you don’t like — that behavior is destructive. It helps nobody. It just causes society to fray around the edges. Sadly the president thinks that’s to his benefit.”

Watch above, via CNN.

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