CNN recently announced it will be hosting eight New Hampshire town hall events featuring most of the Democratic candidates before the state's primary takes place on Feb. 11th. While Democratic candidates Deval Patrick, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang all received invitations, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) wasn't invited. And as Brad Polumbo writes in the Washington Examiner, "the candidate has every right to be ticked off."
(Via the Washington Examiner)
The congresswoman is outpolling Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang, and Deval Patrick in New Hampshire, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages. Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts and an establishment favorite, is only polling at 0.3% nationally. Most voters have no idea who this guy is. And while Yang and Steyer fare far better in the polls, they still don’t deserve to be invited, on the basis of objective polling, at Gabbard’s expense.
CNN’s bias is showing. In fact, the network is not even hiding it at this point.
From the way the network sided with Warren to smear Sanders at the last Democratic presidential debate to it now blatantly and inexplicably excluding Gabbard from its town halls, CNN is officially putting its thumb on the scale to hurt anti-establishment candidates.
In Mar. 2019, CNN held a town hall event with Rep. Gabbard. But by October, the relationship seems to have soured. During a Democratic presidential debate on CNN that month, Gabbard took CNN to task for allegedly smearing her as an Assad apologist and a Russian asset.
"Not only that but, the New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war," Gabbard said during the debate. "Just two days ago the New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable."
It wouldn't be the first time CNN played a role in keeping anti-establishment candidates from winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile managed to tip off then-candidate for president Hillary Clinton about a question that was to be asked in an upcoming CNN debate. In the network's defense, Brazile was dropped as a contributor after the story broke. But she was quickly replaced.
Earlier this month, it was clear a moderator was doing what she could to help push aside Bernie Sanders. The bias of moderator Abby Phillip was apparent when she repeated an allegation that Sanders had told Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a private meeting that a woman could never become president. After Sanders denied the allegation at the debate, the moderator repeated it as a fact when asking Sen. Warren what she thought about Bernie's purported comment.