Tom Cotton Absolutely Owns Reporter in Heated Exchange Over Media/Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Biden Story

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sat down on Friday with CNBC’s Squawk Box anchors to talk about the stalemate over the Wuhan virus relief bill and various Big Tech issues in the aftermath of Twitter and Facebook censoring the explosive New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the emails found on it that could prove damaging to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Cotton talked for the first five minutes or so with anchor Joe Kernen about the stimulus bill and in general terms about possible Congressional action over Facebook’s and Twitter’s deliberate throttling of the NY Post story. However, things got really interesting when the senator accused the media of “essentially ignoring” the story, claiming they were doing the country no favors in doing so.

After Cotton made the allegation, co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin swooped in to try and counter Cotton’s claims in a moment of pure Jim Acosta-esque journalistic smugness caught on camera.

In what would ultimately prove to be a failed attempt at white knighting for the media, Sorkin began by telling Cotton that the “media industry that I know has been trying to investigate this and has not been able to corroborate the story.” Sorkin also talked about how the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the same company that owns the NY Post, has “not been able to corroborate the story” and said so “in the news pages of the Wall Street Journal.”

“So just to clarify,” Sorkin stated indignantly, “it is not that news organizations are not looking into this, it’s that they haven’t been able to corroborate the story.”

“A responsible news organization therefore wouldn’t report it,” Sorkin proclaimed.

As Cotton calmly looked on with no reaction, a smirking Sorkin then pivoted to Facebook’s and Twitter’s actions in another attempt to defend the media.

“Now the next piece of this is you’re talking about the tech companies censoring such quote-unquote news. If, in fact, the tech companies had quote-unquote liability like news operations do, you (laughs) wouldn’t want them to be reporting something that they couldn’t corroborate, no?” Sorkin went on to ask rhetorically, believing he was making a brilliant point that totally undercut Cotton’s argument.

Sen. Cotton, without missing a single beat, answered him in kind. “You mean like the Russian collusion hoax and the Steele dossier that you reported on for four years, Andrew?”

Watch:

Wait for it… 😎https://t.co/e5LCpK7M2X pic.twitter.com/4jULdValjB

— M3thods (@M2Madness) October 24, 2020

The full interview can be watched below. In it, you see Cotton and Sorkin go back and forth for roughly three and a half minutes before Cotton gets the last word in and then co-anchor Becky Quick intervenes to segue back to talking about the COVID stimulus bill:

Cotton highlighted the interview on his Twitter feed, expanding on his point about how the media allegedly not being able to corroborate a story has never stopped them from going after Republicans:

The new line from the media is that the Biden allegations aren't yet "corroborated," so we shouldn't discuss them.

Lack of "corroboration" didn't hold them back with the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh! https://t.co/1LFIlXxxMR

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) October 23, 2020

Sorkin responded on Twitter to Cotton’s tweet by thanking him for “the spirited debate.” Cotton, perhaps knowing he easily won this argument, replied by letting him know he was up for another round “any time”: