Dan Abrams Calls Out Critics Ripping NewsNation After Chris Cuomo Hire: The Media ‘Wants to See Us Fail’ for Threatening the Status Quo

NewsNation host and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams hit back against media critics who’ve slammed the network following the hire of former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.

Abrams interviewed Cuomo on his show Tuesday — grilling him over his connection to the scandals of his brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, as well as his denial of the sexual assault allegation that led to his CNN firing. The interview concluded with the news that Cuomo was joining NewsNation to launch a new primetime show this fall, and as Abrams examined media coverage of the announcement, he spotted a pattern.

“Regardless of what you think about Chris, I noticed a trend among those who wrote about NewsNation yesterday,” said Abrams. “Many of the outlets who ran stories on the big news have gone out of their way to minimize this network by focusing on our status as a newcomer and/or our ratings in their coverage.”

Put aside the fact that for a better part of the past year, we were the fastest growing cable network in America, I recall in the early days of MSNBC and Fox when CNN was still the king of the hill, that they got the same sort of treatment. But now it feels like our mission of doing less overtly-partisan news is threatening, or even bothersome, to the politicized media.

Abrams noted that Tuesday night’s broadcast was the show’s most-watched since its September 2021 launch, and proceeded to list off coverage from left and right-wing news organizations that covered Cuomo’s new job by scoffing at NewsNation’s viewership and the fact that it’s a newer, smaller cable network. He shrugged off those snide assertions by noting that “news networks are not built in a day,” and by speaking to the progression of NewsNation’s growth as a centrist outlet.

Seeing all this coverage trying to minimize us drove home such a crucial point for me, and it’s a big reason, part of the reason I’m here. The politicized media wants NewsNation to fail. In the media landscape full of extremists, a network that gives voice to a moderate point of view is an outlier, or a disrupter. We represent an existential threat to a media which, for so long, has profited off of driving us to the fringes. A media which is badly dividing us all. And so, at the end of the day, I guess it shouldn’t really surprise me that the politicized media would take this tack in covering NewsNation, because we’re doing something that could upend the entire media ecosystem. We’re a danger to the status quo.

Abrams, in particular, found criticism from left-leaning outlets to be “totally hypocritical.” He called progressive media companies out for ripping on NewsNations’ ratings when, in the past, those same outlets have complained about Fox News using its high ratings to minimize other media organizations.

“We’re fighting against an entire politicized media that wants to see us fail,” Abrams reiterated. “Look, I don’t know what Chris’s show is going to be. I saw a lot of support, saw a lot of criticism last night after the interview. I ask those critics to reserve judgment for the time being. Let’s wait and see what he brings to the table starting this fall. What I do know is that I wholeheartedly agree that our media is trapped in a vicious cycle of partisanship, and they are trapping the rest of us. This network’s mission, my mission, is to get us out of that cycle.”

Watch above, via NewsNation.

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