The Trentonian (Trenton, NJ)

CNN’s profile of Kellyanne Conway gets social media blowback

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NEW YORK >> CNN’s Dana Bash is learning the perils of doing personalit­y profiles in a political city that’s always on a war footing.

She’s received a social media roasting this week for featuring White House adviser Kellyanne Conway as part of her ongoing feature series, “Badass Women of Washington.” It was first distribute­d online late Wednesday, and it’s unclear how much of it has been shown on the television networks.

Philippe Reines, a longtime communicat­ions adviser to Hillary Clinton, urged Bash on Twitter to “stop, just stop” and compared Conway to Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for Nazi Germany.

Bash’s series was born two years ago, when she and co-workers wondered what Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidenti­al election would mean for women working in Washington. Other profile subjects have included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Republican National Committee head Ronna Romney McDaniel, California Sen. Diane Feinstein and Transporta­tion Secretary Elaine Chao.

Some of Bash’s online critics likened the Conway profile to “putting lipstick on a pig” and said Bash was shameless for posting a soft profile on a week that Conway’s boss, President Donald Trump, has been aggressive­ly criticizin­g Conway’s husband. When Maggie Haberman, White House reporter for The New York Times, retweeted it as a timely story “from the great Dana Bash,” she was attacked online, too.

Bash declined comment and a CNN spokeswoma­n would not immediatel­y make anyone else available at the network to talk about it. Only Reines’ comment drew a response from the CNN Washington correspond­ent on social media.

“I was ignoring your rants until you brought in the Holocaust,” Bash wrote. “As the granddaugh­ter of those who barely escaped the Nazis I implore you to take a deep breath.”

Replied Reines: “I know your background, Dana. Invoking it won’t shame me or spare you.”

It must have felt a little familiar to Bash, whose Pelosi profile last November followed a similar outline: an interview about what it was like for a woman to work in Washington combined with a visit to where they spent their formative years.

She trailed Pelosi to Baltimore’s Little Italy, buying chocolate ice cream in one of the speaker’s favorite shops; Conway showed her a childhood home in working class southern New Jersey, where she was “Blueberry Princess” one year.

She was attacked for the Pelosi piece, too, only from a different side of the Internet.

The conservati­ve web site Red State wrote that the Pelosi “puff piece” signaled that CNN was preparing to do what it could to help Democrats advance their agenda. Similarly, the Media Research Center’s NewsBuster­s site wrote that CNN was gushing over Pelosi.

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