Media concerned about new COVID variant, for Biden's sake: 'The Five'
The panel on 'The Five' discuss.
Left-wing media figures like NBC News anchor Charles Todd appear very concerned about the new coronavirus omicron variant discovered in Botswana – but not chiefly because it may or may not be extensively hazardous, the panel on "The Five" discussed Monday.
On Sunday, Todd suggested President Biden should use the emergence of the new variant to "push back on all this vaccine misinformation from Republicans" and to try to use his political stature to take control of the vaccine mitigation narrative.
On ABC's "Good Morning America," one pundit said the new variant poses a "challenge – particularly on the economic front – heading into an election year for the Biden administration, which is critical and could spell trouble."
"The Five" host Jesse Watters remarked that the media is panicking over the wrong thing. Instead of analyzing the new variant's potential effect on the United States' current statistics, they're worried about their friend in the White House.
"[Could be] trouble for Biden, but not for the people who could get sick," he said, paraphrasing the pundits.
President Joe Biden points to the Oval Office of the White House as he arrives on Marine One on the South Lawn in Washington, Sunday, Nov. 21, 2021, as he returns from Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Watters added that Biden has continued to erode any sense of trust the American people should have in him on his own coronavirus mitigation edicts.
A proponent of mask mandates, Biden was photographed during his Thanksgiving weekend in Nantucket walking in a store unmasked right past a pictorial sign instructing customers to put their face-coverings on.
Host Greg Gutfeld said that when members of the media see everything through a "political lens", they tend to ignore realities of situations and instead focus on their own agenda.
"You end up being a dope who roots for things that harm people but will benefit your politics, right? So what you have [is an] entire progressive movement that roots for a country to hit rock bottom because they will be the ones ready to be able to regrow the country and save the day," he said.
"The party that creates the problems always claims to be the one to solve it."
Watters and host Dagen McDowell further discussed the dichotomy between the media's coverage of coronavirus mitigation in Republican states versus Democratic states.
With Florida and some Great Plains states continuing to top the lists of lowest-coronavirus-contagion rates, the media appears to have stopped categorizing the pandemic by state, they said.
Meanwhile, in places where their political allies are in control, like Michigan, they happily ignore thousands of maskless fans at the Michigan-Ohio State game in Ann Arbor, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is in power – but will criticize such actions in states where COVID is less spread.
"The worst-case numbers [were in] Vermont, [which has] the fourth-highest percentage of fully vaccinated individuals. So Vermont has a case problem, but not all of these wide-open states, where you can suck face with a stranger in Miami if you feel like it," McDowell remarked.