WCVB-TV Channel 5’s Web Site Keeps Promoting Liberal Journalist Soledad O’Brien

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2021/03/03/wcvb-tv-channel-5s-web-site-keeps-promoting-liberal-journalist-soledad-obrien/

Have you clicked on a WCVB news article recently?

If that’s the case, then you likely received a popup before you could read the article asking you to sign up for liberal journalist Soledad O’Brien’s email newsletter.

It doesn’t happen every single time you click one of the television station’s articles. For a NewBostonPost reporter who had not visited the site in several weeks until Monday of this week, the ad popped up on the first article read, but not any of the subsequent ones. However, the reporter then viewed a WCVB-TV Channel 5 article in an incognito window and received the same popup message.

WCVB is the ABC-affiliated television news station in the Boston area. This also happened when the reporter viewed an article on WMUR the Manchester, New Hampshire ABC News affiliate.

Here is what the popup looks like:

For those who are unfamiliar with O’Brien’s work, she has a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television, the parent company of WCVB or WMUR, called Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien. Before that, she was a CNN News anchor and after that, she was a correspondent for a news program for the left-leaning Al Jazeera America called America Tonight. The Qatari government owns Al Jazeera.

So what exactly does O’Brien believe? She regularly expresses her opinions.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, O’Brien frequently called him racist.

Here are a few examples.

On September 29 she tweeted, “I feel like you all should have listened when your Black friends told you the President was a racist. But maybe now that he told white supremacists to ‘standby’ you’ll listen.”

Referring to Trump in a June 14 tweet, she wrote, “(Also cause he’s a racist and a bigot and eventually even the people who voted for him figured it out.)”

And when Trump opposed using the federal government to change local zoning regulations — saying that home values could drop and crime could raise — O’Brien tweeted, “Sooooo. This is racist.”

She was also openly glad when President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

“I don’t know,” she tweeted on November 6. “Sounds like victory has a lot of mothers. I’m glad progressives decided to vote Biden. I’m glad Lincoln project focused on Republicans who might switch to Biden. Kudos to Cindy McCain in Arizona. Doesn’t mean young Latinx people in AZ didn’t help pull out a big win.”

And she apparently doesn’t like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) either.

“Yeah, I think Bernie is terrible (as I’ve said multiple times),” she tweeted in February 2020. “But I more of an ‘anybody but the current resident’ kind of voter.”

Trump aside, what does she think about political and cultural issues?

On May 16, 2019, she quote tweeted a thread about a man who supports abortion, writing, “A guy talking about abortion makes this a worthwhile read:”

She supports athletes who kneel during the national anthem. In October 2017, she tweeted, “They’re protesting police brutality and racism, not the national anthem.”

She opposed the Trump administration’s policy banning transgender troops from the military. In response to a 2018 speech where former First Lady Melania Trump spoke about respecting the military, O’Brien quipped back via Twitter saying, “Except if you’re transgender.”

And in August 2017, she tweeted, “Thread that’s worth reading on immigration:” The thread opposed the RAISE Act, a bill that would have cut legal immigration in half and established a points-based visa system — creating a merit-based immigration system to replace the largely family-based immigration system of the United States. The thread also called the proposal racist.

A spokesman for WCVB could not be reached for comment on Tuesday or Wednesday this week.