Media

Media Bashes Larry Kudlow Over Past Drug Addiction

CNBC

Amber Athey Podcast Columnist
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Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s new pick for chief economic adviser, has been open about his struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, but that hasn’t prevented the media from attacking him for his vices.

Kudlow was fired from a high-profile Wall Street job in the mid-1990s after his life spiraled out of control due to a $100,000 a month cocaine habit. He entered rehab, and in 2013 he told the Daily Mail that he had been sober for 18 years.

While talking about his new position in the administration on Wednesday, Kudlow seemed to reference his addiction by thanking his employer CNBC for giving him a “second chance” on life.

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Despite his openness about his addiction and the hard work he has gone through to overcome it, some media outlets and media members decided to mock his struggles. Others decided that Kudlow’s former cocaine habit was more important to mention than his job at CNBC or his previous service in the Reagan administration.

Mediaite, for example, published the headline “Forget all of the cocaine, Trump’s new economic adviser Larry Kudlow is one of TV’s worst financial pundits,” while The Times referred to Kudlow as a “cocaine TV pundit.”

In another headline about Kudlow’s rise to economic adviser, Inquistr immediately referred to the pundit as a “former alcoholic and cocaine user” and insisted in the following article that Kudlow’s addiction made him a “controversial” pick for the Trump administration.

Kaleb Horton, a “writer for hire” who has bylines in Vanity Fair and Vice, jokingly referred to Kudlow as a “genius” and said, “I think the thing I love most about him is how much that cocaine abuse helped his brain.”

Journalist Ed Krassenstein insisted it was a “fun fact” that Kudlow had “frequent cocaine binges and alcohol problems.”

It appears that Kudlow will be receiving little empathy from the media as he takes his new post in the Trump administration.

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