Charles Barkley has never been one to mince his words. While with TNT, he openly admitted to his distaste for how ESPN works its employees “like a dog.”
Now, he’s opened up about how much he despises CNN despite having worked with them from November 2023 to April 2024 as a co-host alongside Gayle King on his show ‘King Charles’.
Charles Barkley Breaks Down Why He Does Not Like CNN
During an interview with CNN personality Michael Smerconish on SiriusXM, Barkley unloaded on the network. He said,
“One of the reasons I hate CNN now, and I work with CNN — I’m sitting there watching the night shows. They have two Republicans on. Two Democrats. They scream at each other for an hour, and I’m like, ‘That’s an hour of my life I can’t get back.’”
💥NEW: Charles Barkley to CNN’s Michael Smerconish: “I hate CNN!”
Savage 🤣
Even Smerconish couldn’t help but laugh.
Barkley also recently used to work for CNN, hosting “King Charles” on the network from 2023-2024. pic.twitter.com/6kPjDnIQNu
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) August 25, 2026
“Because the Republican’s gonna say everything the Democrats do is wrong. The Democrat’s gonna say everything the Republicans do is wrong,” Barkley continued. “What’s bad about it is, they’re all successful people. I want to help poor people. They make you pick a team based on race, education. Man, this is just rich people against poor people.”
Chuck has been of this sentiment for years now. In 2016, during the presidential race, the 11-time All-Star said, “All politics is rich people screwing poor people,” while calling poor people “too stupid” to know they’re being used as chess pieces in a game.
He reiterated the same to Smerconish by saying, “The rich people? They’re smarter. They’re like, ‘Let’s just make the poor people fight with each other.’”
Barkley has routinely described himself as a political ‘independent,’ and given his criticism of how politics in the United States works, this makes sense.
But when it comes down to election time, he has historically leaned Democrat. He did admit to backing a Republican presidential candidate once in his life, backing John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, during the 2015-16 Republican presidential primaries.
However, while his views do align more with the left, he has criticized them quite openly. In 2024, he bluntly said,
“The reason I think the Democratic Party and Mr. Biden, President Biden, is losing Black votes is they only care about Black people every four years.”
In 2025, on ‘SI Media With Jimmy Traina‘, he even threatened to abandon his allegiance to the Democratic Party if they did not get Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, or Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, to lead the party, saying, “I would not even consider voting for anybody else other than one of those two.”
Given how forthcoming Barkley has been about his political views, seeing a network like CNN push agendas, according to him, simply does not sit right with him.
