CNN (Cable News Network), an American basic cable and satellite television channel, has been the subject of multiple controversies. This article recounts controversies and allegations relating to both the domestic version of CNN, and its sister channels CNN International and CNN-News18.

Allegations of bias

CNN has often been the subject of allegations of party bias. The New York Times has described its development of a partisan lean during the tenure of Jeff Zucker. In research conducted by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors found disparate treatment by CNN of Democratic and Republican candidates during the earliest five months of the Democratic and Republican primaries in 2007: "The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain fairing the worst (63% negative) and Romney fairing a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral. It's not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half of the Illinois Senator's stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama." In a New York Observer column entitled "Clinton News Network", political journalist Steve Kornacki criticized CNN's handling of the November 15, 2007, Democratic presidential debate, calling it biased towards Hillary Clinton.

In September 2009, a Pew Research Center Poll showed that Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to rate the network favorably, while Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to see CNN unfavorably. A 2019 Pew Research survey showed that among Americans who named CNN as their main source for political and election news, 79% identify as Democrats whereas 17% identify as Republicans. Among major broadcast news networks, the CNN audience displays higher levels of partisanship than ABC, CBS and NBC, but lower than Fox News and MSNBC.

Octavia Nasr firing In 2011, Chief Middle East correspondent Octavia Nasr was fired after a tweet saying she was "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect[ed] a lot." Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president of CNN International, said she spoke with Nasr, and "we have decided that she will be leaving the company". Her reason for her removal was given as "As you know, her tweet over the weekend created a wide reaction. As she has stated in her blog on CNN.com, she fully accepts that she should not have made such a simplistic comment without any context whatsoever. However, at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward."

Coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Occupy CNN protest On April 3, 2016, hundreds of supporters of Bernie Sanders protested outside of CNN's Los Angeles bureau on Sunset Boulevard. Sanders supporters were protesting CNN's coverage of the 2016 United States presidential elections, specifically in regard to the lack of airtime Sanders had received. Known as Occupy CNN, protesters claimed that major media networks have intentionally blacked out Sanders' presidential campaign in favor of giving much more airtime to candidates such as Hillary Clinton.

Donna Brazile and Roland Martin

In October 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from John Podesta which showed CNN contributor Donna Brazile passing the questions for a CNN-sponsored debate to the Clinton campaign. In the email, Brazile discussed her concern about Clinton's ability to field a question regarding the death penalty. The following day Clinton would receive the question about the death penalty, verbatim, from an audience member at the CNN-hosted Town Hall event. According to a CNNMoney investigation, debate moderator and CNN contributor Roland Martin (now with TV One) "did not deny sharing information with Brazile". CNN severed ties with Brazile on October 14, 2016. Brazile then resigned from CNN in October 2016 due to the revelations.

WikiLeaks emails

During live coverage of the 2016 elections, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo said that downloading the hacked and stolen Podesta emails from the WikiLeaks website was a violation of law and that only the media could legally do so. The statement was proven to be false and drew criticism to the network.

Coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election CNN Iowa debate moderation

Following the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries debate moderated by CNN and the Des Moines Register on January 14, 2020, CNN was accused by various media pundits of bias towards centrist candidates. The debate moderation by CNN was described by Rolling Stones Matt Taibbi as "villainous and shameful", and Zach Carter at The Huffington Post said the debate moderation was "awful", with Carter writing, "Again and again, CNN anchors substituted centrist talking points for questions―and then followed up predictable responses with further centrist talking points, rarely illuminating any substantive disagreements between the candidates or problems with their policy positions". Jeet Heer, the national affairs correspondent at The Nation said "the big loser of the night was the network that hosted the event. CNN was so consistently aligned against Bernie Sanders that it compromised its claim to journalistic neutrality."

A CNN article published shortly before the debate, which reported that Bernie Sanders allegedly told Elizabeth Warren in private during a 2018 meeting that a woman can't win a presidential election, was criticized for being viewed as a hit piece intended to depict Sanders as a misogynist prior to the debate and for being anonymously sourced. During the debate itself, the article was subject of a series of questions between the candidates.

Trump administration coverage

On January 10, 2017, CNN reported on the existence of classified documents that said Russia had compromising personal and financial information about then President-elect Donald Trump. CNN did not publish the Steele dossier, or any specific details of the dossier. Later that day, BuzzFeed News published the entire 35-page dossier with a disclaimer that it was unverified and "includes some clear errors". The dossier had been read widely by political and media figures in Washington, and had been sent to multiple other journalists who had declined to publish it as it was unsubstantiated. At a press conference the following day, Trump referred to CNN as "fake news" and refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

On February 24, 2017, CNN and other media organizations such as The New York Times were blocked from a White House press gaggle. The network responded in a statement: "Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don't like. We'll keep reporting regardless."

On June 26, 2017, three network investigative journalists; Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris, resigned from CNN over a false story, later retracted, that connected Anthony Scaramucci to a $10 billion Russian investment fund. The network apologized to Scaramucci and stated that the online story did not meet their editorial standards.

In June 2017, the network also imposed new rules on Russia–related stories being published to social, video, editorial, or MoneyStream without going through the chain of command within CNN.

The Washington Post again fact-checked a CNN report regarding Trump on December 8, 2017: CNN ran a story that claimed two sources told the network that the Trump campaign received an email that gave Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. early access to WikiLeaks documents on September 4, 2016. CNN, however, had not obtained the supposed September 4 email. The sender was "Michael J. Erickson", who CNN was not able to contact. The Washington Post, however, did obtain the email, which showed that the email was actually sent on the day after the hacked documents were released by WikiLeaks on September 14, 2016. CNN issued a correction of their story.

In January 2020, Don Lemon had a panel discussion on his show with Republican strategist Rick Wilson and The New York Times columnist Wajahat Ali, both of whom have spoken out against Trump. Lemon began laughing after Wilson joked, "Trump couldn't find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter 'U' and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it" and called Trump supporters "the credulous boomer rube demo." Lemon continued to laugh as the two guests mocked Trump supporters using a southern accent saying things like "you elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling" and "Your math and your readin'." After Trump responded by calling Lemon "the dumbest man on television," Lemon defended himself saying "During an interview on Saturday night, one of my guests said something that made me laugh. And while in the moment I found that joke humorous, I didn't catch everything that was said. Just to make this perfectly clear, I was laughing at the joke and not at any group of people."

Donald Trump 2024 U.S. Presidential campaign coverage On May 10, 2023, CNN held a Republican Town Hall with Donald Trump where news host Kaitlan Collins interviewed Donald Trump on stage with a live audience of New Hampshire Republican voters. Mainstream media organizations widely criticized the event, which came shortly after Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming author E. Jean Carroll. The New York Times headline said, "Trump's Falsehoods and Bluster Overtake CNN Town Hall," while Slate called it "breathtakingly ill-conceived" The Wall Street Journal ran the headline, "Trump Mocks Sexual Abuse Case, Repeats False 2020 Election Claims at CNN Town Hall." CNBC reported, "Trump pushes false election claims, mocks E. Jean Carroll to applause during CNN town hall."

Coverage on international incidents

Persian Gulf War

During the Persian Gulf War in 1990–1991, CNN was criticized for glorifying U.S. military action and excessively pushing human interest stories about American soldiers while avoiding depictions of violent images, the result being an alleged "propagandistic" presentation of the war. A report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) quotes an unnamed CNN reporter as describing "the 'sweet beautiful sight' of bombers taking off from Saudi Arabia" in a 1991 news report. CNN was criticized for having a Lockheed Martin consultant speak about the war, which was seen as a conflict of interest."Gulf War Coverage" , Jim Naureckas, FAIR, 1991

Operation Tailwind

In 1998, CNN, in partnership with sister Time magazine, ran a report that during the Vietnam War the U.S. Armed Forces used sarin gas against a group of North Vietnamese soldiers during Operation Tailwind in 1970 in Laos. The Pentagon denied the story. Skeptics deemed it improbable that such an extraordinary and risky atrocity could have gone unnoticed at the height of the Vietnam War's unpopularity. CNN, after a two-week inquiry, issued a retraction. The story's producers were summarily fired, and one of them has been highly critical of CNN's handling of the story, saying that the network bowed to pressure from high-ranking officials to kill the story.Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Kristina Borjesson, 2002

Suppression of Bahraini protests, and reporting of Iran and Syria