CNN’s Oliver Darcy Tears Into Kristen Welker Trump Interview: ‘Failed Spectacularly to Meet the Moment’
CNN Senior Media Correspondent Oliver Darcy tore into NBC’s Kristen Welker over her interview with ex-President Donald Trump, saying she “failed spectacularly to meet the moment.”
Welker was tapped to replace Chuck Todd as host of the long-running Sunday show Meet the Press, and landed Trump as the headliner for her first episode. That interview produced a lot of newsmaking moments and a blizzard of criticism for Welker and the network, some of which was cited during the show itself.
Darcy was among the harshest critics who focused the high volume of lies and misleading or false statements Trump made, many of which went uncorrected.
In his Reliable Sources newsletter, Darcy was brutal in his assessment of Welker’s performance:
NBC News spent the entire week hyping Welker as someone who “met the moment” as a White House correspondent when “power was held to account” during Trump’s tumultuous presidency. Unfortunately, Welker failed spectacularly to meet the moment during her interview with Trump.
Welker allowed Trump to make a number of statements wholly untethered to reality on a range of critical issues without tenacious, resolute, or meaningful pushback. Trump, a rapid-fire lie machine, did his usual song and dance. He lied about the election. He lied about the insurrection that his lies had spawned. And he lied about pretty much every topic that Welker broached.
Throughout it all, Welker seemed ill-equipped to handle Trump’s trademark bravado. Lacking any noticeable fire in her belly, she at times timidly tried to set the facts straight. But Welker lacked the necessary fervor and apparent grasp of the subject material the massive platform requires to effectively counter Trump, who as The New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker later told her, is like a “bulldozer shoveling falsehoods.” Trump clearly smelled weakness in the air, taking control of the interview as he ignored Welker’s hopeless — yet constant — pleas to “stay on track” and continued flooding the zone with outrageous lies.
Darcy went on to call the interview “a low moment in Welker’s otherwise pristine career.”
He was a bit more measured during his appearance on CNN with Jim Acosta following the interview:
NBC News spent the past week hyping newly minted “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker as someone who met the moment under Donald Trump’s administration when she was a White House correspondent, and she did fail to meet that moment unfortunately during her interview with Donald Trump. There were a number of times where he said things that were just simply untethered from reality, and she did not aggressively fact-check him in a meaningful way.
And look, it’s not easy. I’m not saying it’s easy to interview Donald Trump. It’s a very challenging thing as I just said. But they willfully took on this assignment. And if you’re going to take on this assignment, you’re going to sign up to interview the former president, you have to be ready to interview him in a manner that fact-checks him in real time, in an aggressive way because these aren’t just falsehoods about anything, he’s saying. These are very dangerous lies he’s spreading, and they’re damaging to our democratic institutions. And so carrying them really has a lot of consequence.
Watch above via CNN Newsroom With Jim Acosta.
