Brianna Keilar Tears Into Fox News for ‘Backing Up’ Trump Covid-Flu Comparison: ‘Fair, Balanced, and Unfaraid to Be Dangerously Ignorant’

CNN anchor Brianna Keilar served up an extended monologue about the ongoing Covid misinformation from both President Donald Trump and the cable news network in which he has a long-running love-hate relationship, Fox News.

During her Tuesday afternoon show, Keilar — who has been vocal in going after Fox on this subject a number of times recently — fired off a salvo of critiques at Trump’s new spin about being infected with the coronavirus and shredding him for literally having trouble breathing as he staged a maskless photo op at the White House in a sort of pseudo-victory lap.

“That ‘no big deal’ of a coronavirus showed the White House and inadequate precautions were an opportunity waiting to be seized, but the president supported by helicopter transport and the best medicine that your taxpayer dollars can buy is still unencumbered by science or fact,” she railed. “And now he’s trying to sell his infection as the sacrifice of a true leader.”

“Leading people off a cliff is technically leading, but it’s also stupid and deadly. So where did he come up with this brilliant argument?” Keilar asked, and then answered by showing a clip of Fox News’ Jesse Watters indulging in absurd praise of Trump on The Five. 

Keilar then picked up another leap of Covid logic, when a Trump campaign official claimed on Fox News that the president now has “first-hand experience” with the virus and effectively mocked Biden for having not been infected.

“So the strategy now is, cast his likely self-inflicted infection as a strength and downplay Covid’s lethality as he did just this morning while he is still not out of the woods according to his doctor,” Keilar pointed out. “Trump, again, comparing it to the flu, and where did he get that from?”

Once again, she pulled up two hits from Fox News, of Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Brit Hume brushing off the lethality of the outbreak that infected more than 7.5 million Americans so far.

“Fair, balanced, unafraid to be dangerously ignorant,” Keilar shot back. “‘It will probably almost certainly not kill you’ — except when it certainly does, like it did to the more than 210,000 Americans who have died in nearly eight months. Severely out-pacing the flu. Look at the past decade. A season that lasts seven months, the flu kills about 60,000 Americans. In about the same number of months of coronavirus, we’re at almost four times that right now. The number of Covid deaths have surpassed the past five flu seasons combined, according to the CDC.”

After a clip of Trump revealing to Bob Woodward that he lied to the public as far back as February about the fatal nature of the virus, Keilar noted that Fox News still “backs him up.”

“Its most prominent voices promote a dying-by-Covid-is-okay theme,” Keilar said, “as they tell millions of their viewers many of whom are older and more vulnerable to this virus.”

Once more, a Fox clip proved her point, this time it was Tucker Carlson putting forward a “dying is a central fact of life” argument to downplay the specific risk from Covid.

“And Tucker Carlson is bringing his show to them from the comfort and isolation of a studio where health precautions are taking place,” she then noted, before running a second Carlson clip from March where the Fox host was singing a very different tune.

“That’s right. Before Tucker Carlson subscribed to the ‘no big deal’ school of B.S. coronavirus, he told viewers about the dangers of it.”

The president’s approach to the virus has been so widely panned that others on Fox have called him out on it. Chris Wallace, repeatedly called out Team Trump for taking off their masks at the debate last week, said people need to just “wear the damn mask.” Amid the serious criticism of the president returning to the White House days after testing positive, Brian Kilmeade questioned the wisdom of the move and Sandra Smith confronted one White House official on why Trump would go back when he’s “currently shedding the virus.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.