If the meltdowns by CNN personalities inside Monday’s tense White House press briefing weren’t crazy enough, the reactions on CNN Newsroom were close as host Brooke Baldwin and CNN Politics editor-at-large Chris Cillizza admitted that Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made them “angry” as she called out the media’s liberal bias.

“Look, it's both disheartening and — and it makes me angry to watch that, candidly, as someone who’s sent my entire professional career in journalism and in newsrooms, The Washington Post and now here,” Cillizza complained.

He explained how, in his mind, “[t]here’s a giant difference between making a mistake out of goodwill and making or trying to get it right and missing or making a mistake because you’re purposely doing it.” It sounds about par for the course in terms of CNN spin following their colossal error on Friday, which is: Trust us because we care!

Cillizza continued his pie-in-the-sky sermon, ignoring the fact that prominent sinners in journalism like Mike Barnicle, Brian Williams, and Fareed Zakaria still have jobs:

We do our best with the expectation that your best, like anybody's best, sometimes isn't perfect and when we screw up, Brian Ross is an example, there are other examples, there are penalties for screwing up. That's how it works. But the idea that that can be cited and Donald Trump did this in Pensacola over the weekend, he used almost the exact same words, which is they are purposely doing this. They are purposely getting things wrong out of some sort of partisan agenda. There’s just no evidence of that. Brian Ross getting it wrong — because what he reported was misleading does not mean it was intentionally misleading. Intent matters. They corrected it. He apologized. They suspended him and this — your actions have consequences.

“Yeah. No. It makes — it makes all of us angry. It makes all of us angry,” Baldwin later added in agreement. Tell me again now how most of CNN isn’t taking sides against the President.

Rewinding a few minutes, Baldwin started the festivities seconds after the briefing ended, declaring that it “was one of the sharpest exchanges we have seen between Sarah Sanders and members of that White House press pool in quite a while” as Sanders was left “rattled” and “back[ed] up against the wall.”

She also reaired Sanders’s clash with Jim Acosta and, as is customary after Acosta makes a scene, allowed him to continue his screed once the briefing ended:

Well, it's another day at the White House, Brooke. You know, I think what came up during this briefing was a pretty clear example of what the White House wants to do when it comes to the free press in this country. Every time there is a mistake, an honest mistake, it seems that this White House, this President wants to weaponize it and use it as a way to go after news outlets in this country.

Acosta defended the error by The Washington Post’s David Weigel on the size of Friday’s Trump rally as merely “not an intentional attack on the President as a way to mislead the American people.” This was in contrast to Trump because, in Acosta’s view, “frequently puts out false information intentionally to the American people whether it's online, on the internet, on social media or just speaking to us at new events.”

“And, you know, the President has gone after this news outlet. He's gone after other news outlets after mistakes are made and, Brooke, you know, we are journalists and we are human beings. We’re going to make mistakes, but that doesn't mean that, you know, you throw people overboard every time a mistake is made with a news outlet, and the problem that I had during this briefing is that, you know, you have the President of the United States referring to news outlets that make mistakes as fake news. That's just totally inappropriate,” complained Acosta.

Acosta continued the CNN PR push to emphasize that journalists only “make mistakes from time to time” and thus shouldn’t “delegitimize the entire...free press in this country” when something does happen. One exit question is this: Do Acosta and his colleagues feel the same way about Fox News when they make a mistake?

Here’s the relevant transcript from December 11's CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin: