“What’s happened in Paris is not a secret,” the anchor said on January 9. “There are what they call a no-go zone.” But this exchange didn’t happen on Fox News, which has been ridiculed in the U.S. and abroad over “no-go zones,” leading the network to apologize over the weekend. The January 9th discussion was between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cuomo:
BLITZER: Chris Cuomo, you are there in Paris for us. Have you sensed from the few days that you’ve been there, a growing anti-Muslim sentiment on the streets of Paris?
CUOMO: No. That would be a very difficult thing to tell. Certainly, I haven’t seen anything that I could report on that way. I mean, we have been getting read in about what cultural tensions do exist here. There’s a large part of the population that is assimilated. What’s happened in north Paris is not a secret. We know there were riots there several years ago. There are what they call a no-go zone. There are problems with policing, problems with dis-enfranchisement. And we hear about that in urban centers about what they have to deal with in terms of minorities. But you are also going to have a phobic response when you have a particular member of a group that seems to be attacking the rest. The reaction has been to the violence. It hasn’t been cultural or Muslim centered. It’s just been, who is doing it and how is it going to be stopped?
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CNN, of course, has been spared mockery for such reporting, while simultaneously reporting on the fallout for Fox News–including breaking the story Tuesday that the mayor of Paris intended to sue Fox for doing harm to the city’s reputation. “Anchors and reporters at cable’s oldest news networked came off as gleeful as they highlighted the string of corrections and apologies that Fox News issued over the weekend,” wrote The Washington Post‘s media writer Erik Wemple, who documented a series of “no-go” mentions on CNN, including on Anderson Cooper‘s “AC 360.”
Fox News, however, did go so far as to show a map of the “no-go zones” in France–a mistake not matched by CNN, and an error that figured prominently in the network’s apology. That apology, Wemple notes today, was fodder for more talk on CNN just this morning: “On its morning show ‘New Day,’ CNN today again bashed Fox News over the ‘no-go zone’ disaster without fully acknowledging its own history with the discredited term.”
More: Wednesday night on CNN’s “AC 360,” Anderson Cooper addressed the criticism, saying “I think if you’re going to point fingers at other people’s mistakes, you should also acknowledge your own mistakes…in the wake of the Paris attacks, several guests on this program mentioned ‘no-go zones’ in France; I didn’t challenge them, and twice referred to them as well. I should have been more skeptical. I won’t make the same mistake again.”