CNN is under fire for the countless time this political season after they reported deceptive delegate counts in order to inflate Hillary Clinton’s lead over Bernie Sanders.
During a live segment this week the host of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, questioned CNN host Brian Stelter:
CENK UYGUR: “CNN and all of the establishment press totally tilted the playing field here from day one by counting those superdelegates, when in fact you know the superdelegates do switch their votes all the time. They switched them in 2008. Hillary Clinton had a 100 superdelegate lead which completely vanished in 2008, so why did you count them from day one, which was absolutely incorrect, it was, in fact, journalistic malpractice. Why did you guys do that?”
BRIAN STELTER: “So you’re saying more information is not a good thing? We should hide people from the reality about the superdelegates?”
CENK UYGUR: “No, no, no, no. Brian, this is very important. If you say, ‘hey, superdelegates are likely to vote this way, or say they’ll be voting this way, or count them as an aside, that’s totally fair. count them in the official tally when you know they can and often do switch their votes and have not voted yet, that is simply incorrect. That is not a fact. That is the opposite of a fact.”
Stelter also questioned Uygur on the “milestone” of having a female presidential nominee from a major party, to which he replied “Instead of looking at it as, ‘Hey, one guy hasn’t taken corrupting money and the other one has,’ you frame it as male vs. female. And hence, put me in a position where I’m forced to say, no, I don’t think it would be historic because I think it’s the same old establishment.”
CNN has continued to count unplugged superdelegates along with pledged delegates since the beginning of the 2016 presidential race. This has led to them, along with most other mainstream media, to call the presidential race in Hillary’s favor both before the end of the primaries and before the actual Democratic convention. Uygur says this “is not journalism.”
Clinton currently has a pledged delegate lead over Sanders of 275, most (or all) of which Sanders could make up in the last eight contests where 900 pledged delegates are up for grabs.
You can watch more of the segment between Uygur and Stelter above.
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