Bernie Sanders Clashes With Joe Rogan Over Trump’s Media Lawsuits: ‘The Impact Is Clearly Intimidation’
Joe Rogan and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) clashed on Tuesday over the justification of President Donald Trump’s several lawsuits against media organizations.
During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Sanders said, “One of the things – and there’s a lot of arguments about Trump – that worries me very, very much is this movement toward authoritarianism and going after media, suing media.”
“When you say suing media, are you talking about the CBS lawsuit?” asked Rogan, to which Sanders responded, “Among other things.”
Rogan then questioned, “But don’t you think there’s a real issue with what they did? You don’t think that there’s a real issue in editing conversations to give someone an answer that’s different than what they really answered?”
CBS did not, as Rogan claimed, provide Kamala Harris a different answer than the one she gave. 60 Minutes aired a truncated version of her answer that had been edited down for time.
“Joe, I’ve been on 8 zillion shows in my life, OK? Now should I sue you if you ask me some stupid question that I don’t like?” asked Sanders. “He has sued ABC, he has sued Meta, he is suing the Des Moines Register because of a poll that came out during the campaign that he didn’t like, all right? He is suing CBS for the Kamala Harris interview.”
Rogan replied that it was “not that simple,” since the lawsuits were about more than just questions or remarks the president didn’t like.
“That’s not investigative journalism if you change someone’s answers. If you ask her [Harris] a question and she comes with a rambling answer that doesn’t make sense and you edit that out and insert another answer to a different question that seems more cogent,” argued Rogan, to which Sanders warned, “You’re walking down a dangerous path. Suing media has the impact of intimidating media.”
The senator acknowledged:
Does media get it wrong sometimes? Absolutely. Should you have the most powerful person in America suing media? What is the impact of that? The impact is clearly intimidation. He wants to defund public broadcasting, NPR. What is that? Well because they also would run critical stories of him. This is part – in my view, without getting into any one case – it’s part of a pattern that says, “Hey, I’ve got the power, don’t you criticize me. You criticize me, I’m gonna sue you.” So it’s not whether this show was right or wrong. There are shows every day that get it wrong.
Rogan replied, “But my concern is when you have media organizations that are purported to be objective and then they say things that are defamatory and factually incorrect and they should know that before they say it. What other course does a person have other than a lawsuit?”
“Needless to say, I get attacked all the time by right-wing media. Right? Every day. Needless to say. I don’t sue them,” concluded Sanders. “I don’t think that it is appropriate for the president of the United States to be, in my view, intimidating media.”
Watch above via The Joe Rogan Experience.
