Vice President Dick Cheney praised his wife, Lynne, on Monday for aggressively challenging the impartiality of CNN during a combative appearance on the network last week.
“I thought it was great,” Cheney told Fox News Channel. “We refer to it around the house as the slap down.”
During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Friday, Lynne Cheney upbraided the network for broadcasting a series of reports titled “Broken Government.”
She said the series amounted to “a terrible distortion of both the president and the vice president’s position on many issues.”
Lynne Cheney, who once co-hosted the Sunday edition of the show “Crossfire,” made clear to Blitzer that she believes the network has a strong liberal bias.
“I shouldn’t let media bias surprise me,” she said. “I worked at CNN once.”
She also said it was “shocking” for CNN to air “terrorist propaganda” of Americans being shot by insurgents in Iraq. The controversial footage was videotaped by the insurgents themselves.
“This is not terrorist propaganda,” Blitzer protested. But he later added: “We said it was propaganda. We didn’t distort where we got it.”
At the end of the interview, the second lady said: “Wolf, I am always prepared for you to ask questions that maybe aren’t quite fair, but they’re pretty tough.”
Afterward, she received a vote of confidence from her husband.
“I told her I thought it was a sterling performance,” the vice president said.
“She’s pretty tough and pretty aggressive, and that’s exactly the way it ought to be. She presented, I thought, a very strong case.”
