WATCH: CNN’s Brian Stelter Pushes Back as His Guest Bashes Virginia Election Coverage for Being a Classist ‘Self-Own’

CNN’s Brian Stelter had an engaging conversation with a Reliable Sources guest who argued that the media’s reactions to Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) gubernatorial victory exemplified the divide between the press and the American public.

Stelter, on Sunday, spoke with Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon about her new book: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. The book examines how the media industry has shifted toward elitism in recent years — with Ungar-Sargon arguing that the press is losing their connection to the working class by embracing “highly-specialized, radical academic ideas.”

When asked how the ideas presented in her book apply to last week’s election results, Ungar-Sargon reasoned that Tuesday “was really good advertising for my book because my book is arguing that a lot of the conversation about ‘wokeness’ is actually about class.”

“I think what happened — Glenn Youngkin’s victory was a perfect example of this,” she said. “The media’s response to Youngkin’s victory is literally the reason that he won.”

At that point, Stelter interjected to say “there’s 100 ‘medias,’ 100 ‘reactions.’ You’re being pretty overly-generalizing, I think.”

Ungar-Sargon referred to multiple figures on MSNBC who characterized the victories of Youngkin and Winsome Sears as “a victory for White supremacy.” It was to that point that Ungar-Sargon noted Sears’ victory means she will be the first woman to be elected Virginia lieutenant governor, and the first woman of color from either party to hold that post.

She continued:

When Glenn Youngkin managed to flip majority Black districts, when he managed to get between 40 and 50 percent of Latino voters, are all of those people white supremacists? Of course they’re not. They’re people who are worried about number one: the economy. Number two: schooling. It seems to me such a self-own to tell people who are worried about the economy that that is white supremacy, right? You’re essentially criminalizing the views of working class Americans, and you saw the same thing with the conversation around critical race theory, right? You saw all of these pundits being like ‘these people don’t know what critical race theory is.’ That is not a political statement. That is a class statement. They’re not educated enough to be opposed to critical race theory, how dare they oppose it?

Watch above, via CNN.