“What’s in Scott is a deep respect for everyday people, a desire to not just agitate, but to educate the person he’s talking to about a different point of view,” Jones provides of his colleague. He additionally counseled Jennings for persevering with to indicate assist for Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza by donning a yellow ribbon pin in each phase.
Axelrod, who Jennings says is his closest buddy from his tenure at CNN to this point, praised the pundit for his potential to chop “issues in ways that are provocative and go viral,” including that Jennings has “created these ‘own the libs,’ kind of freewheeling moments, particularly on some of these panels.”
“I don’t always love what he does on TV,” says Axelrod, “but [that’s] not the whole of how I judge him.”
Before making the MAGA case on CNN, Jennings had taken a extra conventional path by means of Republican politics, working for the likes of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell. During the 2016 race, Jennings referred to Trump in a column as “authoritarian” and referred to as out his “vulgar” and “crude” conduct in one other, examples that have been identified in a Washington Post profile of Jennings, which famous he “changed his tune after Trump took office.”
Jennings says Trump has altered the trajectory of the Republican Party by not adhering to “conservative orthodoxy” on the problems which have formed the occasion’s platform. Sometimes on air, that manifests in a fierce protection of the president-elect. Jennings took it upon himself to again Trump’s controversial choose to guide the Department of Defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Jennings slammed the present Pentagon management, saying, “I’ve had just about enough of the so-called insiders running the defense department.”
“Yeah, he’s on TV, but so are the rest of us,” he identified, pushing again towards his colleagues’ assertion that Hegseth lacks authorities expertise.
There was chatter about Jennings himself becoming a member of the Trump administration. He was rumored to be on a brief checklist of candidates to function the White House press secretary, a job that finally went to Karoline Leavitt. Jennings tells me he was not “actively seeking” a task within the administration and wasn’t behind any marketing campaign suggesting his candidacy. “I have no plans to join the Trump administration right now,” he added.
The press secretary gig can be one through which Jennings presumably couldn’t break with Trump—one thing he says he’s prepared to do on CNN. “There have been times when he has done things, said things, that I didn’t agree with, and I’ve not been shy about saying that on the air,” he says. Following Trump’s look earlier this 12 months on the National Association of Black Journalists convention, the place Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s race, Jennings didn’t mince phrases, saying that Trump did “crap the bed” throughout the interview: “The only question is whether he’s going to roll around in it or change the sheets.” Axelrod additionally believes Jennings isn’t “blindly defending everything Trump does.”
“We have free speech in this country, and we have free debate, and we all have to collectively make decisions about how we’re going to govern ourselves,” says Jennings, stressing the necessity for debating points in “an honest and open format.”
“I think CNN is doing that,” he says. “I think the LA Times could do that.”
“When Patrick told me what his vision was for the newspaper—report the news and have a balanced editorial page—I thought that’s exactly what media should be,” Jennings says, including that he doesn’t perceive “what’s so controversial about that.”
But Soon-Shiong’s shake-up on the Times has been “controversial,” as his Times itself described it this previous weekend. Since the Harris endorsement imbroglio, the Times has seen a gentle wave of opinion part departures, leaving solely one of many authentic board members remaining; in the meantime, the Times reported, an estimated 20,000 subscribers dropped the paper. Oliver Darcy, who has been reporting on upheaval contained in the Times, framed Soon-Shiong’s actions atop Monday’s “Status” publication as “Meddling for MAGA.”
The Times proprietor touched on the opinion resignations in our interview, saying that “it was clear that there were very strong feelings about this idea of having a balanced viewpoint.” Soon-Shiong says that he felt that the editorial board was “veering very progressive,” and in his thoughts “it was really not healthy just to have what I call an echo chamber of a single view and almost canceling, so to speak, the views of both sides.”
Soon-Shiong says he’s working by means of a listing of round 20 to 25 candidates “across the spectrum from left, center, to right,” who he’s contacting personally with a possible alternative to affix the restructured editorial board. While he declined to share any names on the checklist, Soon-Shiong says it can probably be introduced early 2025, as soon as the board is filled with new contributors. Jennings’s function, it must be famous, shouldn’t be a workers place.
“I think what he wants to do is kind of visionary, truthfully,” Jennings tells me of Soon-Shiong’s plans. “The editorial board should not be an echo chamber. There should be views that represent all of America.”