CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin took Mediaite inside his recent on-air clashes with Squawk Box co-host Joe Kernen over former President Donald Trump’s media stock and the technical aspects of his sexual assailant status.
Sorkin was a guest on this week’s edition of Mediaite’s new Press Club podcast, hosted by Aidan McLaughlin, to discuss politics, media, and other topics.
McLaughlin asked Sorkin about his frequent sparring sessions with Kernen, especially a pair of recent ones involving Trump:
You and Joe Kernen in particular are often diametrically opposed on an issue.Absolutely.How do you make that work?First of all, I learn from Joe a lot. Because he has a perspective that I don’t often have. But understanding that perspective is super important. So we don’t agree on everything. I actually think we probably agree on a lot more than maybe you think we would agree on. It’s probably like going to dinner with your family at Thanksgiving. There’s going to be different people with different ideas, and we get to play them out, if you will, every morning. And you do get to see different perspectives. I learn from Becky every morning too. Everyone’s got a little bit of a different frame on the world in a way. And that, to me, is actually kind of fun, even though, yes, it does create disagreement sometimes. But I think overall for me, as I said, I learn and I
think the audience learns. Because you get to see, hopefully, all the sides. You’re not just being told one thing over and over again.This week, there was the clash over Truth Social, where I think he thought that you were trying to push him to criticize Trump’s company.In truth on that one, I just thought we glossed over it so quickly. We did the headline and we moved on to something else. And I thought, you know what? Given how much it’d fallen, it’s probably worth lingering on this for a moment. Again, genuinely not as a political argument. But just because we hadn’t actually talked about it in a while, and here we were talking about where the stock was. So that was my feeling. He may have taken it as a political piece. But that’s the fun of it.The other one was on Tuesday, when you discussed Trump being found liable for sexual abuse in the case of E. Jean Carroll. Do you relish in having those kinds of disagreements, even when it can get tense between you and Joe?I enjoy talking about ideas. I like when we are debating ideas. And that could be about tax policy. That could be about regulations, that could be about immigration, all sorts of issues. So I think I just relish the idea of having a great conversation, especially when it’s focused on ideas. I don’t love when itgets personal.Don’t love when it gets personal.No, because nobody likes that.Does it ever carry on off the air?No, for the most part. We were texting this afternoon.And it wasn’t, ‘I hate you’?No, no, no. We were texting about tomorrow.
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