It’s easy to predict how Brian Stelter, host of the Sunday Reliable Sources program on CNN, will respond to any disagreements with President Trump and the anchors on the Fox News Channel. He simply dismisses anything they say as simply being wrong.
That was obviously the case on Friday, when the network’s chief media correspondent was a guest during a segment of the At This Hour program as hosted by Kate Bolduan. He dismissed the network's claims of the left weaponizing the virus against President Trump, “reprehensible” and an attempt “to make this all about Trump and politics when that’s really not the arena this is being fought in.”
After playing some clips from Fox News hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, Stelter sneered:
Yeah, and 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 hammered. So all they see are nails. Sean Hannity exists, in his mind, to defend Donald Trump no matter what, so he is making this about Trump when ultimately it is not.
While claiming that Fox News was the network that was actually "politicizing" the situation, he admitted that President Trump does "deserve scrutiny" for his “lack of credibility." Stelter's snobbery continued, as he called the suggestion that the media was trying to attack Trump, "reprehensible":
"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," he lectured.
The correspondent then dismissed the “pro-Trump media” as being part of an effort to make this “all about the president.”
During the discourse, a chyron across the bottom of the screen read: “Trump’s Media Allies Downplay Coronavirus Risk.”
The At This Hour host began the discussion by showing a sarcastic segment from the Hannity anchor, who noted that “I can report the sky is absolutely falling; we are all doomed. … You’re all going to die in the next 48 hours, … and it’s all President Trump’s fault.”
“Or at least,” Hannity added, “that’s what the media mob” and Democrats “would like you to think during basically the latest effort to bludgeon President Trump.”
