Speaking with CNN’s Michael Smerconish in Saturday, Sean Spicer, the RNC’s Chief Strategist and Communications Director, said, “I think, by and large, CNN does a great job of covering the news.” He also said, “I’ve had a great relationship with a lot of the folks at CNN.”
Given Spicer’s title as Chief Strategist and Communications Director, it was revealing that he told Smerconish, “I really haven’t kept track of the tick-tock” between CNN and Ben Carson when invited to speak about this very issue. Spicer was wholly unprepared to directly respond to CNN’s “investigation” of Carson’s childhood or to Politico’s yellow journalism. He also stated that he has not communicated with Carson’s campaign about the week’s events.
In other words, the GOP’s top media strategist hasn’t been watching the informally-coordinated attacks on his party’s current front runner, and hasn’t talked to him or his campaign about it.
Spicer noted the double standard in the treatment of Republicans and Democrats by most of the media. He also explained part of the reason for the alternative media’s ascendance, rooted in its coverage of stories mostly ignored by the “mainstream media.”
Smerconish essentially demanded that the GOP play nice with CNN and like-minded left-wing media outfits. He said, “A Fox-only constituency cannot get your man or your woman elected.” Given the increased scrutiny placed on left-wing media resulting from the debacle that was the CNBC debate, Smerconish was understandably doing his part to close ranks and shield his business from challenges to its faux pretense of objectivity. He then asked in a rhetorical manner whether or not the eventual GOP nominee “can get elected playing only in the Fox sandbox during the nomination process.”
“I think, by and large, CNN does a great job of covering the news.”
RNC Chief Strategist and Communications Director Sean Spicer
Smerconish then parroted the conventional wisdom of the necessity of winning over independents in general elections. Admonishing the GOP to relax its newfound intransigence toward left-wing media, Smerconish said, “The take-on-the-media mentality… bodes poorly when you’re trying to win over independents in a general election.” Yet Mitt Romney won independents in 2012 while losing to the incumbent President Barack Obama, yielding the latter’s second presidential term.
In July, Spicer failed to dismantle CNN’s narrative of Mike Huckabee’s Holocaust invocation “crossing a line” when pressed by Kate Bolduan.