NRO’s Charlie Cooke Goes on Morning Joe to Condemn Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow’s Coverage of Florida Covid Reporting

Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow caught a bit of friendly fire from their cable new network colleagues at Morning Joe Monday morning, as National Review’s Charles Cooke called out their coverage of alleged Florida Covid reporting whistleblower Rebekah Jones.

Jones is the former “dashboard manager” of the Florida Department of Health and according to Cooke’s recent report, she “single-handedly managed to convince millions of Americans that Governor Ron DeSantis has been fudging the state’s COVID-19 data.”

In a piece published for National Review Online on May 13 titled “Rebekah Jones, the COVID Whistleblower Who Wasn’t,” Cooke effectively argues that Jones is the one person who single-handedly has advanced this conspiracy theory, which has “been repeated by others, sure: by partisans across the Internet, by unscrupulous Florida Democrats such as Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist, and on television, by MSNBC in particular.”

At the height of the Covid crisis came a major allegation out of Florida that the state was underreporting coronavirus cases and deaths made by Jones. Her home was raided by state officials, which quickly went viral as she claimed the governor was out to get her. New reporting alleges, however she never had access to change the data, as she claimed, and was actually fired for not following company policy.

Credit to Morning Joe bookers for inviting a conservative-leaning guest to critique media coverage of Governor Ron Desantis and his management of Covid-19 in Florida.

“You cannot comment on Florida’s Covid response without hearing about [this story],” Cooke noted. “It’s been shared by Nikki Fried, who’s running for governor. By Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow, by Chris Cuomo on CNN,” he noted. “And it’s been widespread enough that Jones has raised $500,000 off of it. And it’s astonishing to me that nobody has really looked into this, because while this has poisoned millions of minds, it’s easily rebuttable looking at public information.”

Cooke goes on to explain the specifics of why Jones is not a credible critic, details of which he reveals were easily discovered, which only made his aspersions towards media figures who didn’t do the actual reporting themselves, look even worse.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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