Media Bias: Soledad O'Brien describes senator as "cowardly," president as a "bombastic bully"

With the Neutral Zone Infraction, Just the News tries to do its part to maintain the line between fact and opinion in American journalism by blowing the whistle each week on an egregious example of slanted coverage by reporters. This week's offender: Soledad O'Brien.

Soledad O'Brien this week on Twitter described President Trump as a "bombastic bully" and called Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul "cowardly."

O'Brien works on Hearst Television's program "Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien," and she runs her own production company called Soledad O'Brien Productions.

The TV show's website characterizes it as a "political magazine program" and describes Soledad as "an award-winning journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist."

On her company website O'Brien's biography describes her as "an award-winning journalist, documentarian, news anchor, and producer." The site says she "hosts the syndicated Hearst TV news program 'Matter of Fact,' distributed by Sony Pictures."

On Monday, O'Brien made the comment about Trump in a tweet responding to CNN's Brian Stelter, who had called the president "a master storyteller."

O'Brien disagreed, describing Trump as "a bad storyteller" and "a larger than life bombastic bully."

O'Brien on Tuesday described Sen. Paul as "cowardly."

Such comments venture deep into the territory of opinion.

During a recent interview O'Brien spoke about her practice of engaging in media criticism on social media. She said that she can share her opinions because she helms her own company.

"You know, I don’t really think of it as recent, partly social media has enabled us to have that conversation," O'Brien said. "And I think certainly under Trump, I felt like things had to be said that journalists, who would, by the way, text me and reach out to me behind the scenes, and lament what they had to do, but felt they had to keep their job and do it. So, I felt like, well, I can do this because I’m self-employed. I run a production company, and I have my opinions, and I think Twitter is a very good platform for your opinions and mine are informed because I’ve been in the business 31 years."

Rolling Stone last month noted that she took issue with a comment describing her as "more of a liberal activist than a journalist." 

"Such a categorization, O’Brien says, is only accurate 'if you consider yelling at people on Twitter activism,'" reported the magazine's EJ Dickson. "'I’m in the service of telling people, "This is just bullshit." This is just not true.'"

Just the News attempted to reach out for a comment from Hearst or O'Brien. A Hearst Television spokesman declined comment.