Appearing with CNN’s Brian Stelter this Sunday, former CNN host Soledad O’Brien slammed the media networks for allowing Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric to go unchallenged.
O’Brien called out the media for going through “contortions to make things seem equal all the time” when comparing Trump to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“If you look at Hillary Clinton’s speech where she basically pointed out that what Donald Trump has done — actually quite well — has normalized white supremacy,” O’Brien told Stelter. “I think she made a very good argument, almost like a lawyer. Here is ways in which he has actually worked to normalize conversations that many people find hateful.”
“I’ve seen on-air, white supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates,” she pointed out. “And they do a five minute segment, the first minute or so talking about what they believe as white supremacists. So you have normalized that.”
“And then Donald Trump will say, ‘Hillary Clinton, she’s a bigot.’ And it’s covered — the journalist part comes in: ‘They trade barbs. He said she’s a bigot and she points out that he might be appealing to racists.’ It only becomes ‘he said, she said.’ When in actuality, the fact that Donald Trump said she’s a bigot without the long laundry list of evidence, which if you looked at Hillary Clinton’s speech, she actually did have a lot of really good factual evidence that we would all agree that are things that have happened and do exist. They are treated as if they are equal.”
“That’s where journalists are failing: the contortions to try to make it seem fair,” O’Brien added.
Watch the entire segment in the video below:
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