CNN Senior Correspondent Donie O’Sullivan confronted a trio of Trump-friendly media figures with White House access, asking one directly: “Do you consider yourself a journalist?”
O’Sullivan spoke with Real America’s Voice Chief White House Correspondent Brian Glenn, LindellTV White House reporter Cara Castronuova, and Bannon’s War Room Co-Host and White House Correspondent Natalie Winters for a segment that aired on the network Wednesday.
When O’Sullivan asked Winters if she viewed herself as a journalist, she replied that she did.
“Yes,” she said, adding at another point in the discussion: “Our bias is not to be sycophants for President Trump. Our bias is for our audience, which is the working class of America—the people who want to put this country first.”
O’Sullivan followed up by asking whether she would “call it out” if Trump “messes up.”
“Yeah, and we have, I think time and time again, particularly on the…issue of immigration,” she replied. “We are not for stapling green cards to diplomas.”
Winters, a self-described “populist nationalist” who has said she agrees with “most of what Trump does,” emphasized in a New York Times profile that she is not a “cultist.”
A staff writer for Bannon’s podcast in her first year at the University of Chicago, Winters began making on-camera appearances in 2020.
“The pandemic’s really where she got her sea legs,” Bannon said of the 24-year-old.
O’Sullivan also asked Winters about those who are skeptical of her credentials.
“To the people—and I’m sure you see this online every single day—who say you don’t deserve to be here because you’re not a real journalist, what’s your response to them?” he wondered.
Winters replied, “Well, I’m pretty sure the group of people in there spent, what was it, four years, covering for someone who was essentially dead—and that’s being charitable in my description of him—a president by the name of Joe Biden‚” she said. “So to all those people who are apoplectic over having new media voices, you guys failed, and that’s why we’re here.”
O’Sullivan also spoke with Castronuova and Glenn, whose contributions as members of the White House’s shakeup of the briefing room and press pool include Glenn insulting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not wearing a suit, and Castronuova asking about Donald Trump’s “fitness plan” while commenting admiringly that the president “looks healthier than ever before.”
Castronuova, a self-described Trump fan, claimed she too would have no issue holding Trump to account.
“I’m sure things will happen that I disagree with,” she said.
When pressed if she could name any such instances thus far from Trump’s second term, she didn’t do so.
“I’m not going to—let me put some thought into that for a second,” she said, pausing. “Um, I’m just overwhelmed with how well I perceive things to be going.”
As for Glenn, he insisted his comment about Zelensky’s attire was earnest.
“I’m not a troll. Never have been,” he told O’Sullivan. “That was a legitimate question that I just wanted to ask. I didn’t mean to get everyone fired up like they did.”
The post CNN Confronts MAGA ‘Journalists’ Trump Brought to White House appeared first on The Daily Beast.
