CNN anchor Anderson Cooper appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers yesterday. The duo spoke about Cooper’s press tour with his mother Gloria Vanderbilt last spring, where the two promoted their book, as well as The White House’s contentious relationship with the news media. President Trump recently referred to the media “the opposition party,” and has frequently referred to CNN as “fake news.”
“President Trump watches CNN all the time,” Cooper told Meyers. “This is not in dispute at all because he has texted about people I’m interviewing while I’m interviewing them. It’s on in his offices at Trump Tower…he watches me on CNN more than my mom watches me on CNN.”
Meyers conceded that while cable news is important and helpful, perhaps there’s a limit as to how much one should be watching.
“Well if he had a Nielsen box it would be even better,” Cooper said. “At a certain point you would think that there has to be something more important going on that the president could be doing than flicking around the shows.”
Meyers also asked Cooper about how they cover an administration that publicly puts them down. “Has the antagonism this administration has been expressing towards the press changed the way you cover it, or is it pretty much the same, but with a different subject?”
“I think it’s pretty much the same,” responded Cooper. “It’s not as though the Obama administration was the most welcoming. The president stopped talking to me for a long time after I spent two months in New Orleans covering the BP oil spill. They apparently didn’t like the coverage.”
“So I really don’t want to be buddy buddy with any of these people…our job is to ask tough questions of all sides and to be fair,” continued Cooper. “But I do think it’s inappropriate for the president of the United States to be referring to CNN as ‘fake news.”