Jake Tapper Says More Willing To Burn Bridges In Trump Era
Image by CNN
Jake Tapper has never been afraid of a tough interview. But the CNN politics anchor says that since the election he’s gone one step further, developing the spine to ask hard questions even if it means a guest won’t come back on his program.
“One of the things that I have found myself more willing to do is have an interview and bear down enough that it’s possible that person won’t ever come back,” he told the Hollywood Reporter, in a rountable with other news hosts, including CBS’s Gayle King and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “It’s an ugly reality of what we do. Even though you want to challenge them, you don’t want to piss them off so they boycott you for years or forever.”
He cited as an example an interview he did with Vice President-elect Mike Pence during the transition period. Tapper pressed Pence hard over Michael Flynn Jr., the ex-national security adviser’s son whose tweets endorsed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Pence has not returned to Tapper’s show on CNN since.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
