CNN’s New Day co-anchor Chris Cuomo is known for making questionable statements on air and on Twitter, as has been documented in this space. In the past, he’s compared Megyn Kelly to monkeys at a zoo, misinterpreted the First Amendment on hate speech, and plenty more.
But today, following President Trump tweeting CNN was fake news and lambasting Cuomo for not asking Senator Blumenthal about fabricating his military record (even though, to Cuomo’s credit, he did ask the senator about that), he mentioned his thoughts on being labeled fake news on Sirius XM.
Appearing on his CNN colleague Michael Smerconish’s XM program, Cuomo said, “The only thing that’s bothersome about it, is that I see being called ‘fake news’ as the equivalent of the n-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity. That’s what fake news is to a journalist.”
He went on to say, “It is an ugly insult and you better be right if you’re going to charge a journalist with lying on purpose and the president was not right here and he has not been right in the past.”
But after the controversy ensued, Cuomo walked back the rhetoric on Twitter, saying “I was wrong.”
