Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, slammed Fox News Friday for broadcasting what he described as “reprehensible” coverage of the deadly coronavirus.
Mr. Stelter took a swipe at CNN’s cable news competitor in response to Sean Hannity and other Fox News hosts recently accusing Democrats and the media of weaponizing the disease.
“These are people who are, for some reason, only making this about politics, trying to focus only on politics, and that’s because they are hammers, so all they see are nail,” Mr. Stelter said during an appearance on CNN’s “At This Hour” program. “Sean Hannity exists, in his mind, to defend Donald Trump no matter what, and so he is making this about Trump when ultimately it is not.
“Unfortunately, the president and his lack of credibility is an issue, and the White House deserves scrutiny on that front,” he said. “But it does seem like there is an attempt from pro-Trump media to make this all about Trump and politics when that’s really not the arena this is being fought in. The battle against this virus is not being fought in the political arena, but that’s the only place they know.”
CNN subsequently aired a montage of several Fox News fixtures claim Democrats and the media are using the virus to take aim at Mr. Trump.
“They are rooting for the problem to get worse,” Pete Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” said in a segment showed by CNN. “They have yet to find a reason to drag down the presidency of Donald Trump.”
“Democrats and their media cronies have decided to weaponize fear and also weaponize suffering to improve their chances against Trump in November,” echoed “The Ingraham Angle” host Laura Ingraham.
Mr. Hannity, for his part, recently claimed “the media mob and the Democratic extreme radical socialist party” is “politicizing and actually weaponizing an infectious disease in what is basically just the latest effort to bludgeon President Trump,” CNN noted.
“I wish I could just laugh at it, I wish I could write it off as being unimportant, but it’s reprehensible for them to be out there saying the media is trying to take down Trump and weaponize fear. There’s real consequences to this,” Mr. Stelter said.
“Even before the president took office when the Ebola scare happened in 2014, he was out there making a lot of noise about it, right-wing media was out there hyping fears about it,” he added. “Now they feel the need to protect the president from potential political damage by saying the Democrats and the media are out to get you. I think most will see through it, but it is still reprehensible.”
A spokesperson for Fox News did not immediately return a request for comment about Mr. Stelter’s remarks, which were first reported by Mediaite.
More than 82,000 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed, including 59 in the U.S., since the potentially deadly respiratory disease COVID-19 caused by the virus was discovered in China in December, The World Health Organization reported Thursday.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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