Trump’s interviews in Davos will be with Trump-friendly blowhards Piers Morgan and Joe Kernen

Special Programs LGBTQ

Written by Bobby Lewis

Published


Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

President Donald Trump reached Davos, Switzerland, on January 25 to attend the World Economic Forum. During his visit, the president is scheduled to be interviewed by Piers Morgan (formerly with CNN) for broadcast on ITV and Joe Kernen for CNBC. Throughout their media careers, Morgan and Kernen have demonstrated a lack of journalistic credibility and, over the last few years, both have embraced some of Trump's worst traits.

Piers Morgan:

  • Following the historic 2017 Women’s March in Washington D.C. and sister marches across the U.S. and the world, Morgan denounced the marches as a “global emasculation of my gender” and an “anti-democratic protest at Trump winning the presidency.”
  • He gushed about Trump’s “absolute mastery” of Twitter in a December 2016 op-ed, and encouraged him to “carry on tweeting, don’t change your style, and continue to infuriate your mainstream haters.”
  • He considers Trump his “good friend” and said that “I genuinely like him.”
  • He obsessively attacked a transgender activist whom he had interviewed on his CNN show, and deflected criticism by demanding that trans people “pipe down” and “quit the ludicrous hysterical rhetoric” against him.
  • He hosted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his CNN show. 
  • Morgan was editor of the Daily Mirror when its publisher, Trinity Mirror, was engaged in "the bulk of the alleged wrongdoing" in the News International phone hacking scandal. Lord Justice Leveson, who led the British government's investigation of the scandal, concluded that Morgan "was aware" of phone hacking that “was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it.” 
  • He defended white people using a variation of the N-word while singing Kanye West songs, conceding that it's “absolutely predictable and understandable” for white people to think "'If black people use it, why can't I?'"
  • He blamed black people for the N-word continuing to exist in vocabulary.
  • He pushed the “all lives matter” argument, which specifically aims to counter or negate the importance of Black Lives Matter. Challenged on this by black rights activist DeRay McKesson, Morgan replied, “I love my whiteness and your blackness,” a take on McKesson’s expression, “I love my blackness. And yours.”
  • Morgan blamed the Kardashian family’s “altar of reality television” for former Los Angeles Lakers player, and Khloe Kardashian’s former husband, Lamar Odom’s 2015 coma. 

Joe Kernen:

  • In 2012, Kernen helped Trump push the birther lie when Barack Obama was president (Kernen later emailed Media Matters, stating that his “personal view” was that “there is no doubt that President Obama was born in America.”) 
  • During a segment on India’s central bank’s decision to raise interest rates, Kernen tried to make a joke with a stereotypical Indian accent and also asked if Indian rupees were accepted at 7-Elevens in the U.S. (he later apologized.) 
  • In 2015, Kernen began an interview with Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who was a potential presidential candidate at the time, by noting that “we've been together every step of the way on this show since your first election.” He then helped Walker blatantly misinform about his record on economic development in Wisconsin.
  • During the 2016 presidential campaign, Kernen interviewed then-candidate Trump and not only agreed with Trump’s smears about Hillary Clinton’s health, he also falsely claimed Trump’s schedule was more “grueling” than that of the Democratic candidate.
  • In 2014, Kernen dismissed a climate science argument by saying “I don’t argue religion with people.” He also said killer lampreys pose a more serious global threat than climate change and once compared climate science to “witchcraft” and “Orwellian groupthink.”
  • In 2017, Kernen praised Rick Perry’s comment on his show that the primary contributor to climate change is “ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”
  • The same year, Kernen endorsed Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s absurdly false claim that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change.