Behold one of the most biased, combative interviews that has ever taken place on CNN. On Friday afternoon, Christiane Amanpour badgered Daniel Hannan, a conservative British Member of European Parliament who was a leading voice for the successful Brexit campaign, for nine minutes straight. Amanpour, like her network at large, seemed hell-bent on painting the “Leave” campaign as racist, but Hannan refused to let her succeed.
“Would you agree then that the Leave campaign’s main objective, in terms of sovereignty, was to stop the free movement" of people? she asked Hannan, quite directly.
“What you are suggesting is outrageous,” he said.
Amanpour, as a means of providing what she considered evidence, insisted on playing a CNN clip showing them interviewing pro-Brexit voters in the UK. The three voters they featured made what some might consider racist anti-refugee comments. Hannan refused to put his earpiece in to listen to the biased coverage.
Amanpour also provided a statistic CNN obtained that suggested a 57 percent rise in hate crimes since the Brexit vote. Hannan pushed back at those statistics, asking how it could have spiked so dramatically in just 48 hours.
“You guys have been shouting ‘racist’ so long you haven’t been listening to what we’re actually saying,” Hannan said. “When have I ever made immigration my issue?”
Hannan then summarized his feelings toward CNN’s Brexit coverage.
“If I was relying on CNN as my only source of evidence, I would think that this was a nativist vote, a protectionist vote – it’s the opposite.”
The MP went on to composedly explain that Britain voted to become a sovereign nation because the EU is in decline and they want to “raise their eyes to more opulent markets overseas.” It’s all in his book, he said.
In terms of immigration, it can be up to Parliament to determine who can and cannot enter the country, he added.
Those comments caused Amanpour to accuse him of backpedaling on the pledges he made during the campaign. His rhetoric now sounded “softer,” she insisted.
“Then people at home can Google this, they can look at what I’ve said, and they can see whether it is fair for you to accuse me of having done a U-turn,” Hannan returned.
He asked her to retract her comments, and she refused.
“I’m not retracting anything!”
Way to stay neutral, CNN.