By Molly Goddard
7:58am PST, Jan 23, 2025
The day before the Monday, January 20, inauguration, Thompson, 67, called a meeting where he told reporters to stop "pre-judging Trump" during their coverage. The company's top stars
Jake Tapper and
Anderson Cooper were allegedly present.
Per the source, the boss instructed employees not to "relitigate the past" despite the Republican leader's controversial moves, such as coming after
birthright citizenship, pardoning January 6th insurrectionists and withdrawing from the World Health Organization during his first days in office.
"[Thompson] does not want them endlessly poking the eye of the sitting
president and believes that Trump should be shown some deference," Darcy claimed. "And he has made it clear that he wants the MAGA movement to have a seat at the table when discussing political topics… even if certain pundits do use the platform to make incendiary and sometimes false claims."
When the meeting finished, Thompson was not met with any resistance from his staffers.
Later on, the leader allegedly emphasized in an editorial meeting how he wanted to see "fair-minded" reporting on the new administration without being "tough-minded."
This attitude toward Trump is much different than former CNN CEO
Jeff Zucker — who resigned from his position in 2022 over his consensual romance with his closest colleague. The 59-year-old allowed anchors to call out the businessman live on-air and fact-check his allegedly false statements.
Despite the orders from the higher-ups, Tapper, 55, Cooper, 57, and their colleague
Van Jones were warned of the possible spread of misinformation with
big tech CEOs being close to Trump during a Monday, January 20, broadcast. However, they also pointed out the faults of the left.
"We're about to enter an era of deepfakes and all sorts of misinformation and the degree to which those five gentlemen play a role or do not play a role, will be pivotal in terms of where the American people are four years from now, in terms of understanding what is true and what is false," Tapper said of Meta CEO
Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla founder
Elon Musk, Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos and Apple CEO
Tim Cook being at the swearing-in ceremony.
Tapper pointed out that the five people "control so much of the information that we receive, so much is in their hands when it comes to ascertaining, monitoring or refusing to monitor what is real, what is not real."
"Not just talking about we, the
United States, you're talking about the world. All the human beings on the planet, they control access to information. They're the gatekeepers in many ways to information for the entire planet," Cooper added.
Jones, 56,
elaborated on how we will look back at the pictures of the group of powerful men sitting behind the right-wing leader at the event years from now.
"Look, that picture is going to be historic. I call it the revenge of the nerds. Don't forget, all four of those gentlemen, four years ago, were supporting the Democratic Party," he explained of things changing.
"An untold story here is how the Democrats go from four years ago to having the White House, the Senate, the House and Silicon Valley to now all four are in the hands of Donald Trump," Jones continued.
On a more centrist note, Jones claimed former President
Joe Biden's administration backed away from tech companies by failing to introduce cryptocurrency regulations and harping on the idea that all big business was bad.
"Elon Musk was an
Andrew Yang Democrat. But when Joe Biden did his EV summit, he left Elon out. There were so many unforced
errors on the part of the Biden Administration," the civil rights advocate said.
"Those four are all our folks who got pushed out of our party because we didn't have an innovation first approach from the Biden White House and we're now paying the price. It's not just that we lost the White House, the House, the Senate. We lost Silicon Valley in the past four years, and you got nobody to blame but us," Jones emphasized.
