White House Excludes CNN From Annual SOTU Media Lunch; Trump Had America’s Top TV News Anchors Over for Lunch—and Ate Them Alive

By The Hill. The White House has excluded CNN anchors from attending a private annual lunch it hosts on the day of the State of the Union, according to three unnamed sources in a network report.

Trump has often had a contentious relationship with the media and CNN in particular.

In the past, the president has referred to CNN as “fake news,” and some of his rally attendees have chanted “CNN sucks” when Trump broaches the subject of the media.

According to the network, the lunch is a time for “off the record” discussion and for the journalists to get a sense of what the president is thinking before he addresses the nation that evening. However, this will not be the case for members of CNN’s news team this year.

Two of the network’s current anchors, Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, were invited to and attended the 2019 lunch, and Blitzer has attended the lunch 20 years in a row, according to the network. (Read more from “White House Excludes CNN From Annual SOTU Media Lunch” HERE)

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Trump Had America’s Top TV News Anchors Over for Lunch—and Ate Them Alive

By The Daily Beast. Donald Trump served various television news personalities a lunch described by one White House guest as soup and filet of sole Tuesday—but soon the assembled anchorpeople were eating out of his hand.

Much to the disappointment of folks at CNN, nobody at the long table—who included NBC’s Lester Holt and Chuck Todd, ABC’s David Muir and George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan—bothered to ask why the president had gone out of his way to exclude the cable network run by Trump’s former friend Jeff Zucker.

“MSDNC isn’t here as well,” Trump quipped—to polite chuckles but zero protests (not even by Meet the Press and MSNBC anchor Todd) from his captive audience, who were there ostensibly for a briefing on tonight’s State of the Union address but instead were treated to a lot of presidential boasting about his poll numbers and the “through-the-roof” stock market, and a lot of gloating about the “fiasco” of Iowa’s Democratic caucuses and the general disarray in the out-of-power party. (Read more from “Trump Had America’s Top TV News Anchors Over for Lunch—and Ate Them Alive” HERE)

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