Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz recently expressed his disappointment with certain networks that are viewed as being critical of President Donald Trump for no longer inviting him on to share his opinion and debate topics.
Dershowitz, who said he voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, told C-SPAN's John McArdle that partisanship has intruded on constitutional analysis. He added that partisanship hasn't just affected politics, but has infiltrated the media as well, calling the division a "tragedy."
"It's a tragedy that the media have become so divided. Today there are Trump channels and anti-Trump channels," Dershowitz said. "You want to get the anti-Trump news you turn to CNN and CNBC. You want to get the pro-Trump news you turn to Fox."
Dershowitz credited former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite for being someone in the media who people could trust and called for a return to objectivity in reporting. After being a Democrat his whole life, Dershowitz said his comments about Trump since he took office have resulted in dwindling invitations to appear on certain networks.
"I used to be, for example, on CNN more often than on Fox. I was a regular, not paid, but a person who was on all the time debating with [CNN Chief Legal Analysts Jeffrey] Toobin debating with others," Dershowitz claimed. "I haven't been on CNN now since the summer, and Fox calls me all the time."
He added that since making comments in defense of Trump from a legal standpoint, he's seen an increase in calls from people who "misunderstand and think I'm pro-Trump." Dershowitz said he isn't pro-Trump, as some consider him to be, and he added that it's been difficult to get airtime on what he called 'anti-Trump' networks.
"I'd love to be available to people who watch all channels, and I try to write op-eds widely for different newspapers and different media," Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz's seemingly pro-Trump rhetoric hasn't only affected his professional life; he told McArdle that it's meant making sacrifices in his personal life, as well. The law professor recently authored "The Case Against Impeaching Trump," and claimed that had Clinton been in the White House when the book was written, people's opinion of him would be different.
"If I had written 'The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton' if Hillary Clinton had been president, they would have built a statue to me on Martha's Vineyard," Dershowitz claimed. "But, instead, my friends on Martha's Vineyard need trigger warnings. They don't want to be seen in the same room as me because my book has been, 'The Case Against Impeaching Donald Trump."
He added that the goal of his book is to promote the idea that impeachment shouldn't be used promiscuously and had Clinton been in the White House instead of Trump, he would have argued the same points in his book.
This isn't the first time Dershowitz has spoken out about changes he's noticed in how he's been received since being perceived as a Trump supporter. During an interview with The New York Times, Dershowitz said that defending the president was worse than when he was a lawyer on O.J. Simpson's team.
"This is much worse than all that, because in those cases people were critical of me, but they were prepared to discuss it. They were prepared to have a dialogue," Dershowitz said. "Here, the people that I'm objecting to want to stop the dialogue. They don't want to have the conversation. It will upset people at the dinner party or on the porch. This is like safe spaces in colleges."
Dershowitz previously told Fox News that although people think he's a Trump supporter when he gives his opinion of the president, he's just doing it through a legal lens and it has nothing to do with the actual person.
"My really, really close friends say, 'You're 100 percent right in your analysis, but can't you just shut the f**k up and not talk at all,'" he told Politico. "They tell me, 'This is a time for selective silence.'"
Dershowitz added that along with dwindling dinner invitations, his own nephew believes he's helping "one of the greatest dangers in American history" remain in office. To which, Dershowitz replied, "I'm just standing up for principle."
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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