Four days after President Obama insulted job creators by asserting "If
you've got a business, you didn't build that; somebody else made that happen," CNN finally reported the controversial remarks, and only once
the Romney campaign featured them in a campaign attack.
In contrast, when Romney surrogate John Sununu said on Tuesday morning
that he wished "this President would learn how to be an American," it
only took CNN a few hours to jump on the remarks. The network mentioned
them every hour between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. and anchor Wolf Blitzer even
brought Sununu on for an interview to explain himself.
The three major networks shared the same double standard [1]
when it came to ignoring Obama's quote, but CNN is a 24-hour news
network and it did not touch the story all through the weekend.
In fact, the very first mention of Obama's remark on CNN came from
Republican Senator Ron Johnson (Wisc.) on Tuesday morning's Starting
Point. And CNN only reported the quote when Mitt Romney made it the
centerpiece of his campaign's attacks on the President.
Correspondent Jim Acosta, who shadows the Romney campaign, quoted
Romney paraphrasing Obama's gaffe in his campaign report that aired
during the 2 p.m. hour of Tuesday's Newsroom. That evening, Anderson
Cooper aired a report on both Obama's and Sununu's comments.
Ironically, CNN's White House correspondent Jessica Yellin highlighted
the delay in the Romney campaign's response to Obama's gaffe, but made
no mention of her network's four day silence. "[W]e talk about this
campaign moving so fast that everything's at Twitter speed, but It
actually took a few days for Team Romney to capitalize on this
soundbite, but now it's getting traction," she said on Thursday's The
Situation Room.
Yellin's own network should be embarrassed at catching up to a four
day-old story only because the Romney campaign brought it to the
forefront.
-- Matt Hadro is a News Analyst at the Media Research Center