A CNN panel slammed rival Fox News’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the right-leaning network of putting lives in danger by “downplaying” the health crisis.
Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, said on Sunday that his network took a look at some recent Fox News shows and found many had highlighted President Trump’s “law and order” initiatives over the pandemic.
“When I see these shows talking about anything but the virus, I view that as a form of downplaying, or even denialism,” Stelter said.
Kirsten Powers, a CNN political analyst and columnist for USA TODAY, said Fox News is ignoring the “main news” of the country, referring to a series of COVID-19 case spikes in some regions of the United States.
“It clearly is them trying to avoid a topic that is not beneficial to the president and goes against his narrative,” Powers said. “And I think, you know, early on, the studies show their refusal to accept this was a real problem versus the narrative that this was just something that was being done to harm the president, obviously cost people — it cost a lot of lives.”
Powers added that she believes people who watched media networks outside of Fox were more likely to follow public health precautions and guidelines.
“I have a lot of friends who have parents who watch Fox News, and they were having such a hard time convincing them that this wasn’t a liberal media hoax that was being perpetrated against the president,” she said. “And so, they weren’t taking any precautions early on.”
“And so, if you look at the studies showing that the people who were consuming mainstream media were taking the precautions, the people who were consuming right-wing media were not taking precautions and were believing that it was this attempt to harm Trump — there’s no question they have done irreparable damage,” she added.
David Zurawik, a media critic at the Baltimore Sun, said making mask-wearing a political debate is one of the ways media outlets are doing harm to the public.
“The truth is, wear a mask and you will be safer,” he said. “But we have President Trump, of course, in his vanity, not wearing a mask and his inability to say he was wrong. And then the right-wing media echoes that. And we see the result. We see the result in these spikes.”
Zurawik pushed back on the idea that people want lockdowns to end in order to get out of their homes. Trump has been a strong proponent of getting the economy open quickly and allowing people to continue their lives with precautions.
“One of the things they also pushed, that Trump pushed through his right-wing messaging machine, was this totally unsubstantiated notion that Americans can’t be kept in their homes, Americans need to be free to go out and do stuff,” he said. “And I see it in stories about parents who are saying, ‘My children need to go play — go to summer camp and play baseball. I can’t keep them penned up.’ … This is not a game of words. This is life and death.”
“There is people who put that message out, and I don’t understand how anybody who calls themselves a journalist could not give citizens the information they need to make an informed decision about their lives with masks and social distancing,” he continued. “But Trump and his right-wing messaging machine are muddying the waters, confusing them, and telling them they don’t need to do it.”
Stelter also pointed to Fox News host Sean Hannity’s recent town hall with Trump, calling it “propaganda” intended to tout the president’s accomplishments while ignoring the pandemic.
The U.S. has had over 2.5 million cases of the coronavirus and over 127,000 deaths from it so far.
