CNN sends Trump campaign cease-and-desist letter over ‘false, misleading and deceptive’ coronavirus advert

Lawyers for CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia have slapped the Trump campaign with a cease-and-desist letter for manipulating the cable news network’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in a new ad, saying the campaign ad distorts the meaning of what an anchor and his guest said.

The ad — which cost the campaign in the “mid-seven figures” to air on cable and broadcast channels, according to CNN, and is titled “American Comeback” — joins the canon of misleading videos and edited footage that have marked the Trump campaign and presidency.

The ad is ”false, misleading and deceptive” in its use of CNN footage from 30 March, the WarnerMedia lawyers wrote in their letter, CNN reported.

In the ad, which includes pulled and edited news clips, CNN‘s anchor Wolf Blitzer asks the network’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, “Is it accurate that if these steps had not been put in place there could have been 2m people dead here in the United States?”

“Yes,” Mr Gupta replies, as the video cuts back and forth between the CNN footage and b-roll of cancelled flights from China, an allusion to the president’s restrictions imposed in February on travel from the country where Covid-19 first appeared in humans.

But the clip is edited in a way that misrepresents how the exchange actually went down on 30 March on Mr Blitzer’s primetime show “The Situation Room.”

Mr Blitzer’s actual question was about governors’ stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures — not Mr Trump’s travel restrictions on China.

In the full clip, Mr Blitzer asks Mr Gupta, “Well, is it accurate that if these steps had not been put in place, the stay at home orders, the social distancing orders, as the President said yesterday, it could have been 2 million people down here in the United States?”

Mr Gupta replies: ”I mean, you know, these are all models, Wolf. It’s a little tough to say, but, you know, if you talk about something that is spreading, you know, very robustly throughout a community. You know, two to three times more contagious than flu, and up to 10 times, perhaps even more than that, more deadly than flu, then yes.”

A lawyer for WarnerMedia, Rick D. McMurtry, wrote to Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh that the ad “purposely and deceptively edits the clip to imply that Mr. Blitzer and Dr. Gupta were crediting the president’s travel ban policy issued in January for saving millions of American lives, when in fact Mr. Blitzer and Dr. Gupta were discussing recently implemented social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders issued by state and local governments,” CNN reported.

“CNN hereby demands that you discontinue airing the advertisement with the CNN clip that has been distorted in such a way as to mislead the public,” McMurtry wrote.

In a statement to CNN Business, Mr Murtaugh defended the ad without responding to the claim that the CNN footage from 30 March is edited in a malign way.

“No discussion of efforts to prevent American deaths from the coronavirus can be had without the understanding that President Trump restricted travel from China in January. Based on that alone, the ad is accurate,” Mr Murtaugh told the network.

The ad is hardly the first time Mr Trump and those close to him have been accused of manipulating video footage in a misleading way.

In February, the president posted an edited video that appeared to show Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripping a copy of his State of the Union speech while the president was saluting a Tuskegee airman and other guests.

Requests from Ms Pelosi to Facebook and Twitter to have the video removed were rejected.

In May 2019, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, shared a deceiving video on Twitter that made it appear Ms Pelosi was slurring her words. The video had been slowed down from its original version to amplify the effect of slurred speech.

“What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi?” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his tweet, which he later deleted. “Her speech pattern is bizarre,” Mr Giuliani had written.