Great (Streaming) TV, Jarring ‘Puff’ Piece | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

CNN+ host Chris Wallace interviewed First Sister and longtime senior campaign official Valerie Biden Owens for his new show Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace.

Much of the interview centered around Owens’s new book “Growing Up Biden,” which chronicles her close relationship with President Joe Biden and his family over the years, as well as her work in building his career.

During one tense exchange, an almost apologetic Wallace asked about the strife that has dogged the president’s only surviving son. Owens objected to Wallace’s characterization that Hunter has had “a troubled life,” pushing back and emphasizing how proud she is of her nephew.

Wallace spent a portion of the interview grilling Ms. Owens about President Biden’s promise, made during his inaugural address, that ”We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury.”

After playing a clip of that moment, Wallace asked why “that hasn’t happened,” and about how lambasting Trump in her book fits into her brother’s pledge.

Again it turned into a great exchange.

Wallace’s new format for frank conversations with big names, which is also an old format that once dominated the news interview game, continues to deliver for the streaming platform – which to be equally frank, can use the help.

Three days before Jeff Zucker fired Chris Cuomo last year, CNN received a letter from an attorney for one of Cuomo’s former coworkers. Per the New York Times, it alleged that while he worked for ABC News, he harassed her and that he “badgered her for sex, and after she declined, he assaulted her, she said. She ran out of the room.”

The letter alleged Cuomo later contacted her “seemingly out of the blue” while he was working at CNN during the height of the #MeToo movement. It claimed the host offered to do a favorable segment about her employer, which turned out to be a public relations firm working for WeWork.

According to the letter, the woman attempted to ignore Cuomo. But he did the segment anyway. The Washington Free Beacon unearthed that old clip on Tuesday.

“Viewers tuning into CNN on a chilly morning in December 2017 might have been puzzled when a treacly corporate promotion interrupted the network’s wall-to-wall news coverage of the Trump administration,” the Beacon wrote, in a article that characterized it as a “corporate puff piece” delivered out of the blue amid real news coverage.

Not surprisingly, Cuomo did not explain the segment’s supposed raison d’être. In a statement to the Beacon, a CNN spokesperson declined to comment saying the issue “may be related to litigation.”

There’s been plenty of that, where Chris Cuomo is concerned. Litigation. Likewise questions going unanswered.

Yet there always seems to be more of both.