On Thursday night, CNN’s divisive, hate-filled, and juvenile rhetoric continued with the return of their Coronavirus: Facts and Fears town hall after a two-week absence due to their gleeful focus on inflaming the country’s racial tensions.
Host Anderson Cooper suffered yet another immature meltdown (like this one) insisting that the Trump administration doesn’t give a damn about the American people in terms of the coronavirus. And along with co-host Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the pair sucked up to Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) by falsely claiming New York was “a success story” in the pandemic that he should feel “pretty good about.”
Cooper and Gupta set the table with spin while speaking in serious tones. After Cooper praised Europe for having successfully thwarted the virus while the U.S. failed, Gupta lectured viewers that they have become “numb” to the virus and allowed daily death tolls that mirror “mass killings.”
This gave way to Cooper’s prepubescent tirade, which began by blaming the Trump White House for the pandemic’s severity and diagnosing what’s inside the heart of the President: “And the President, after declaring himself a wartime President, battling an invisible enemy, now seems to want nothing to do with the virus, the task force, the sick, and the dead.”
Cooper also complained about the refusal for the White House to greenlight any government scientist or Coronavirus Task Force member to appear on the show, but based on CNN’s inability to show concern for or fairness to opposing viewpoints, it’s hard to blame them.
Along with an amusing gripe about the end of coronavirus briefings (yes, the ones the left wanted to end or at least stop airing), Cooper’s punditry accelerated with more vast, ugly claims without evidence about the motives of the Trump administration (click “expand,” emphasis mine):
[W]e used to see Fauci and Birx every day when they used to answer questions at the briefing room. But the White House doesn't do that anymore because the President suggested we inject disinfectant into humans to experiment on them to see if you could bleach the invisible enemy out of the body. He embarrassed himself, and for that, the Coronanvirus Task Force was brought to an end. The White House doesn’t want to talk about this virus and they couldn’t be clearer about that. They want you, they want the American people, to believe that it’s nearly gone away, dying out as the President said. Not a great choice of words, by the way. The virus is not dying out, but people continue to die. 617 today as of 7:00 tonight. The Coronavirus Task Force that was famously taken that big, strong, “whole of government approach,” which Vice President Pence talked about so often, they've gone into hiding. It's like they're in the Witness Protection Program or something. They don't hold public briefings anymore. They don't update the American people about the hot spots that are flaring up daily, including where the President is going this weekend.
No, this administration wants you to believe the only reason we're seeing increasing number of cases is because of increased testing. And that’s just simply a lie and they know it. It's a bare-faced lie and, in Vice President Pence's case, violating his own task force’s guidelines about wearing masks. I mean, he's so scared of the President cause the President doesn’t wear a mask. He so wants to curry favor with the President that he doesn't wear a mask. He even tried earlier this week to get governors to perpetuate the lie about testing, and then he got caught and he just merrily moved along. This is gaslighting turned up to 20.
Gupta then teased Governor Cuomo’s appearance with a massive lie: “His state has gone from the epicenter to perhaps the biggest success story in containing the outbreak.”
Yes, the state (their state) with 17 percent of the cases in the country, double the deaths as the next state (New Jersey), and nearly four times the deaths as the state in third (Massachusetts) was a “success story” to CNN.
In other words, CNN saw no issue with the seven major errors unearthed in a June 11 Wall Street Journal investigation regarding New York’s response or the nursing home policy that killed seniors like both of Janice Dean’s in-laws.
With their silence and refusal to cover these issues in the Cuomo interview, Cooper and Gupta should be shamed and called out for this failure to show compassion and demand accountability of people they like.
All told, Cooper and Gupta offered six softballs to Cuomo. Cooper went first and boasted that “New York has done much more than just turned a corner” and praised him for the possibility he could force anyone coming to New York to self-isolate for two weeks (a policy Cuomo loathed when roles were reversed).
Eventually, Cooper asked a question (if one could call it that): “First of all, you've got to feel pretty good about what is happening in the state. How does it feel to you, what do you see in the numbers?”
The second dealt with the mandatory quarantine and, in the third, Gupta jumped in to boast before another quarantine question that “[i]t seems like you always have to think a few chess moves ahead.”
The remaining questions weren’t any better and, of note, the final one followed the liberal media’s narrative of shaming the upcoming Trump rally but seeing no issue with Black Lives Matter marches and protests (click “expand”):
COOPER: How do you move forward in a city like — like New York? I mean, you have now, you know, restaurants, bars doing takeout, but, you know, you've seen large crowds gathering, hanging out on streets on a weekend night. The city doesn't seem to be able to really do anything about that. Businesses, I guess, they can police what's right out in front of their business, but I mean, can they tell, you know, somebody who — half a block away to move along, or is that the city's responsibility? How does the city move through these stages now?
(....)
GUPTA: You know, masks have become such a contentious issue. It's remarkable, governor. As you know probably, Governor Newsom ordered that masks are now mandatory in most public places in California, something that you did, you just mentioned back in April for New York. Why — why do you think that this has become such a contentious issue, when the evidence is clear, we've been talking about it, can reduce transmission significantly? Is there a way to move beyond this so it's not so contentious any more?
(....)
COOPER: Is — you know, we're seeing this now, this rally this weekend in Oklahoma. The President’s going to, you know, theoretically pack 19,000 people into an indoor arena, doesn't seem like there's any social distancing. No one’s required to wear a mask, though they'll probably hand them out. Will you allow a large political rally in New York in these circumstances, in these times?
So nothing about his “don’t make me come down there” tweet on the same day that tens of thousands gathered in Brooklyn for black trans lives. As White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Jim Acosta on Wednesday, Cooper and Gupta need to work on their internal cohesion and get back to us.
