CNN has a significant problem with paying pro-Trump contributors for on-air commentary even though they regularly mislead and lie to viewers, forcing other CNN personalities to push back on the falsehoods that CNN paid to air in the first place.

This nihilistic grift was on full display on the January 23 edition of New Day, on which CNN senior political commentator Rick Santorum misled viewers about President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial throughout an eight-minute segment. Along with sparring a bit with Santorum, anchor Alisyn Camerota aired a clip from a January 1999 interview in which the then-Republican senator expressed support for calling new witnesses in the impeachment trial of then-President Bill Clinton -- a contradiction of his current stance on impeachment witnesses in Trump's Senate trial. At the end of the discussion, moments after Santorum had just finished misleading the CNN audience on matters of enormous consequence, fellow CNN political commentator Paul Begala and CNN anchors Camerota and John Berman shared a laugh about Santorum’s good looks, with Berman claiming that “he hasn't aged a minute” since the 1999 interview clip.

CNN has attracted significant media attention for its dedication to hiring pro-Trump commentators, many of whom are legally forbidden from criticizing Trump due to a nondisparagement clause in nondisclosure agreements that many former Trump officials have signed. 

Perhaps due, in part, to the fact that they legally cannot say anything bad about Trump, CNN's stable of pro-Trump contributors regularly push falsehoods or misdirection onto the network’s viewers (though their dishonest nonsense is not limited to Trump-related topics). Lowlights since the 2016 election include the claim that Trump is too much of a “celebrity” to be expected to understand campaign finance laws and the argument that Trump should still pursue a Ukrainian investigation of the Democratic National Committee server even if it is based on a debunked conspiracy theory (it is). 

CNN’s pro-Trump contributors don’t just embarrass the network by lying and misleading with uninformed on-air arguments, but they also frequently have attacked CNN before they joined the network, continue to attack CNN while employed by the network, and then go on to do so even after they leave. CNN’s pro-Trump contributors have also concealed significant conflicts of interest; helped right-wing media rewrite history on Trump’s defense of neo-Nazis at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; tweeted a Nazi salute at Media Matters President Angelo Carusone; and more. One now-former pro-Trump CNN contributor has even said that he “went over to CNN partly at the suggestion of the White House itself and the president himself,” meaning he helped the president push his spin to CNN’s viewers, even as the network was ostensibly holding him accountable.

CNN effectively pays pro-Trump contributors to mislead its audience, and many of them regularly embarrass and shame CNN with their dishonesty, smears, and political hackery. But at least network personalities can agree that Santorum “hasn’t aged a minute,” and everybody can laugh about it.