Has CNN Reversed Its Ban on Clay Travis?

CLAY: Buck, I just got invited on CNN! I just got… I don’t even… I feel like we need the breaking news sound effect.

BUCK: I thought you were banned, and you’d be arrested by Jeff Zucker’s minions at arrival in the building. Apparently, the lifetime ban no longer applies to Clay Travis for the B-word situation?

CLAY: I don’t… Yes, for saying… well, the B-word. I said I believed in only two things completely about four or five years ago: The First Amendment and boobs.

BUCK: Oh, my gosh! He said it again. Get the bleep button.

CLAY: And CNN banned me. And while we were on the air right now, I got an email from one of Chris Cuomo’s producers. I’ll read it to you. “I’m a producer on Chris Cuomo’s show at CNN, and I hope this email finds you well. I’m reaching out regarding the use of masks in your school district to see if you might be interested in being a guest on our show tomorrow night to discuss your point of view. We’re on from 9 to 10 Eastern. Kindly let me know if this might work for you, and we can go from there.” Now, that’s a nice email, right?

BUCK: Yeah, that’s totally professional. I wish you could go. You know you can’t go because of Fox. But it would be great.

CLAY: Yeah. Fox. That would be a really fun event that would probably kill, if they had cross pollination, Fox News and CNN, sort of like you went on rival shows for a week where you —

BUCK: It’d be amazing. It’s actually what political commentary media 10 years ago did have some of that.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: People forget, Bill O’Reilly —

CLAY: Used to work at CNN.

BUCK: I was a right-wing political commentator at CNN, and now in the Trump era that broke them, and they couldn’t handle that anymore but before that, yeah, you’d go on TV and I would say stuff all the time. We’d get into huge fights. I did a lot of stuff about…

The classic thing at CNN was I would go on air after some massive terrorist act because I had worked at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and actually knew a lot of this stuff, unlike a lot of clowns they put on to talk about it. And everybody at CNN, all of their people, would say, “This is what happens when X or Y country doesn’t do a good enough job of making its migrants feel comfortable” or something.

They would have some horrible take, and I’d say, “I don’t know. I think we should defeat the bad guys and actually fight them,” and they’d say, “How dare you!” They’d all flip out and everything else. CNN is crazy. But, back in the day, you used to have people —

CLAY: Diverse opinions.

BUCK: Bill O’Reilly in the Fox News days used to have leftists on, and he would throw down with them all the time.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And it was good TV. No one does this anymore, and I feel like there’s an audience component to it and there’s obviously a host component to it. We haven’t yet seen…? Here’s an example. Why haven’t we seen a debate between Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, for example? I think Tucker would do it, by the way. MSNBC would never let that happen. Why?

CLAY: I think it’s a fantastic point, and look, I would go on Chris Cuomo’s show and talk about why masks make no sense. I’m not allowed to do that because I’m a Fox employee in the same way that CNN is not allowed to have any Fox employees. If I had said I was gonna do this, Buck, I bet that almost immediately I would have gotten shut down by CNN.

They have to send in their list of guests that want to be on the shows and one of the executives would have taken a pen and said, “Yeah, this isn’t happening.” I do think… The reason why I think that would be important is, so many people live in media silos where they don’t challenge whatever they believe, that there are huge… We were talking about those numbers of kids that have died with covid.

Under 200 kids have died with covid compared to 40-some-odd-thousand who have died under the age of 11. That’s data that everyone should have. I bet that almost no one at CNN or MSNBC has any idea those numbers are real. If you ask them how many kids 11 and under have died of covid, they would have no clue.

So, you have all these media silos where the truth doesn’t get through. And that’s why I would go on a network like CNN to say the same thing that I say to you guys on the radio show and on the television programs I do go on.

BUCK: I would love to go on cable news and fight with leftists. I would do it all day, every day.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: When I first started out, they would put me on MSNBC and I would debate people, and then at CNN. But now they won’t give me anybody to actually debate, ever.

CLAY: You would win. That’s why.

BUCK: So, you sit there and you say, “Well, how can people actually understand the strength or weakness of an argument?”