According to Jonathan Turley, a well respected Washington political correspondent who tends to lean ever so slightly left, the mainstream media is crossing an ethical boundary by jumping on an obvious hit piece against the First Lady. The rat who taped the conversation should be the one taking the heat and Anderson Cooper is just as culpable. Turley sounded the alarm, practically accusing Cooper of journalistic malpractice for helping the traitor to profit from her treachery, just to throw mud at Melania Trump.
Media treachery ahead of the election
With a highly controversial presidential election right around the corner, CNN’s Anderson Cooper decided to devote a prime time media segment to diffusing some of First Lady Melania Trump’s popularity with the voters. The woman who annoys Democrats, simply by walking around looking like a fashion model everywhere she goes, was secretly recorded by a traitor when she took a rare moment to let her hair down and be an ordinary person for a friendly chat over coffee. Turley cries foul.
“Years ago,” Turley writes, “American politics left all notion of decency behind in our age of rage.” First, “the media and liberals celebrated the disgraceful conduct of Maryanne Trump betraying her aunt’s confidence in secretly recording her talking about her brother.” Then, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen “not only secretly recorded his client, President Donald Trump, but has been violating any notion of confidentiality in pushing his own tell all book.” Anderson Cooper just walked off a journalistic cliff.
“Now, CNN’s Anderson Cooper has been reduced to shilling for Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the former assistant and friend of Melania Trump who secretly recorded their confidential chats and is now selling a book by playing embarrassing snip bits.” The media is just totally shameless these days, as Turley points out. “What is incredible about these people is that, while currying favors as false friends or counsels, they were actively taping people who trusted them in case they wanted to later cash in on their access.” That means any powerful employer better watch out, because you never know who might have a recorder running in their pocket hoping to hit the lotto with the right misstatement or casual remark.
Who cares about decorations?
After Wolkoff left her position at the White House, she kept in touch with the First Lady. In the summer of 2018, she met with Melania and secretly recorded their casual, friendly conversation, hoping to cash in on a media deal. Melania Trump didn’t leak any state secrets or drop any bombshells but that didn’t stop Cooper and CNN from making a feature presentation of Melania bashing the odious detail of planning the Christmas Decorations. She’s used to hiring people for that but she understands the obligation and does it. You can’t blame her for whining about it a little. Most folks put her to shame just trying to untangle the twinkle lights.
“I’m working my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f–k about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?” Cooper thought he hit the journalistic jackpot. “Talk about a war on Christmas!” He declared. Turley sees the stunt Cooper pulled as “an example of how corrupting the current environment has become for many. There is a new sense of an absolute license to engage in any attack or distort any fact for the greater good.”
After he got the tape playing again following Christmasgate, the First lady continued, “OK, and then I do it and I say that I’m working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children that they were separated?’ Give me a f—ing break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that?” The real story, as Melania Trump’s chief of staff Stephanie Grisham notes and the media totally ignores, “secretly taping the First Lady and willfully breaking an NDA to publish a salacious book is a clear attempt at relevance. The timing of this continues to be suspect – as does this never-ending exercise in self-pity and narcissism.”