Joy Reid Slams Anderson Cooper’s ‘Straw Man Argument’ Defending CNN’s Trump Town Hall

MSNBC host Joy Reid attacked CNN anchor Anderson Cooper on Friday for defending his network’s controversial town hall with former President Donald Trump.

“And we begin with the continued cleanup on aisle five at CNN,” opened Reid on her show The ReidOut, before playing an alleged audio recording published by the website FTVLive of CNN CEO Chris Licht defending his company’s town hall on Wednesday:

You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them. Kaitlan pressed him again and again and made news. Made a lot of news… While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also  an important part of the story because the people in that audience represent a large swath of America, and the mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that those people exist.

Reid continued, “Hours after that call, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper essentially repeated his boss’ argument on his show, scolding his own viewers in what even some former CNN anchors like Sunny Hostin described as gaslighting.”

The MSNBC host then played Cooper’s segment, where he said:

That man you were so upset to hear from last night, he may be president of the United States in less than two years. And that audience that upset you, that’s a sampling of about half the country. They are your family members, your neighbors, and they are voting, and many said they are voting for him. Now maybe you haven’t been paying attention to him since he left office, maybe you’ve been enjoying not hearing from him, thinking it can’t happen again, some investigation is going to stop him. Well, it hasn’t so far. So if last night showed anything, it showed it can happen again.

Reid criticized Cooper’s defense, responding, “Now that is what you call a straw man argument.”

Reid argued that Americans “didn’t need a Trump pep rally on CNN to understand what Trump is,” as “he literally posts his garbage views on his fake Twitter every day” and “every media outlet reports on it.”

“We get it, a lot of people like it and vote for it,” she said. “But we don’t need CNN, or John Malone, or Elon Musk, or Anderson Cooper to lecture us about how we should be forced to endure it, or that we should just get used to it. Because some of us actually know that that stuff is wrong.”

Minutes later, Reid also responded to reports that CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy had been summoned to a meeting with Licht after he reported in the Reliable Sources newsletter on Wednesday that CNN was facing backlash within the company over its town hall.

“You have Oliver Darcy, who is a journalist they employ, who is their media person since they booted Brian Stelter – they thought he was too left somehow,” Reid said. “Oliver Darcy comes out and does something that you would think would be allowable inside a news network that doesn’t have an agenda. He criticized the platform that was provided to Trump and the way it was provided.”

Reid and MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan previously criticized CNN on Thursday, calling the town hall “depressing” and “blatant fascism meets The Jerry Springer Show.”

Watch above via MSNBC.