During President-elect Donald Trump's press conference on Wednesday, he got into a tiff with CNN's Jim Acosta. Trump refused to take a question from the reporter, and dismissed him after calling Acosta and CNN "fake news."
This prompted both Fox News's Neil Cavuto and Sean Hannity to also take their shots at CNN, both essentially saying that now the network knows how it feels to be in Fox's shoes for once.
During his show, Cavuto went on a rant saying that CNN "can’t figure out suddenly not being in," and that it "cuts you to your journalistic core, doesn’t it?" He then ended his rant by saying that when President Barack Obama attacked Fox News, CNN's "silence was deafening."
Hannity's bit included a solid verbal beatdown about Buzzfeed's history of leftist bias, and then turned on CNN, noting some of their reporter's collusion with Democratic leadership during the 2016 presidential elections. Like Cavuto, Hannity ended his segment by stating that the leftist media was silent whenever Obama went after them.
However, both statements from Cavuto and Hannity are demonstrably false, and the proof lies in the incident surrounding Fox New's own reporter James Rosen being investigated by the Justice Department in 2013. The story goes that Rosen was part of a leak of classified information about North Korea in 2009. The Justice Department labeled Rosen a "possible criminal c0-conspirator," and searched through his private emails for evidence.
The fear amongst journalists was that the constitutionally protected rights of the press was being threatened in the form of Rosen being investigated for merely doing his job, and reporting information given to him by government officials. So many in the press, both on the left and right sides of the political spectrum rose up to defend Rosen.
This includes a CNN corespondent.
Fox News itself acknowledged these journalists standing up for Rosen in an article it released in May of 2013 titled "They all stand with Fox News' James Rosen." In the article itself they include quotes, and statements by Keith Olbermann, the New York Times Editorial Board, two Washington Post columnists, and CNN's Chief Washington Corespondent Jake Tapper.
"Good to see so many progressives taking the principled stance on the DOJ's dangerous attack on Fox's James Rosen," said Tapper in a tweet, noting the leftists standing up for a Fox News reporter.
While many of the criticisms leveled at CNN are accurate, the claims made by Hannity and Cavuto are both false. When Fox News' own reporter was being targeted by the Obama administration, journalists of many stripes arose in protest of the Obama administration's "thuggish attempts to criminalize the practice of journalism," as New York Post's Michael Walsh put it.
