In a tense exchange on CNN’s “New Day,” a conversation about the diversity of Donald Trump’s cabinet choices quickly shifted to a debate about diversity in the media.
CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota asked Mollie Hemingway, Senior Editor at The Federalist, if she would be concerned with an all-male or all-white cabinet. While Hemingway did not say this would bother her, she did call for more diversity in the media.
“If the media really are concerned about diversity, I think that they can look inward, particularly after this kind of election where they so misread everything that was happening, and start putting in newsrooms people who don’t share all of their same views,” Hemingway said, noting that women on TV are “almost uniformly liberal.”
She went on to condemn the media’s coverage of the 2016 presidential election, claiming that Trump supporters were often painted as racists and bigots.
Camerota then defended “New Day’s” coverage, saying that the morning show never called anyone racist but let guests explain their positions themselves.
“We had our finger on the pulse of Trump supporters,” she said. “I talked to scores of them and represented how they felt and broadcast that.”
Symone Sanders, a CNN political commentator who previously worked on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, said that Hemingway’s concern about diversity in the media but not in the Trump administration is a problem.
The people mentioned as top contenders for posts in Trump’s cabinet have so far been mostly white men.
“Yes, we need diversity of sentiments in the media as well,” Sanders said. “But I absolutely believe it is okay to require, to request and to demand that the people’s house, that the Trump administration, look like America.”