This week on a bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Soledad O’Brien joins Molly Jong-Fast to discuss trust in the media, Fox News, coronavirus vaccines, and Afghanistan coverage.
“Misinformation is an amazing tool to get people to not trust in their leadership or in the government. And I think the government and the media, too, have done a very poor job in making people trust them,” the broadcast journalist and talk show host says.
In her view, CNN host Chris Cuomo’s entanglement with his brother, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, damaged the network’s credibility as a whole.
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“The whole Chris Cuomo thing: How would you feel about CNN being trustworthy and transparent and open when you read through that story? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist,” she said. “They don't have our—the listeners’, the viewers’—interest at heart.”
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But O’Brien saved her harshest criticism for Fox and Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt.
“Everybody at Fox is vaccinated, but they’re going to continue—especially that stupid blonde one, what’s her name? Ainsley,” O’Brien said. “She’s just going to continue to talk like ‘I don’t even know about vaccines. Who knows?’ What a complete, non-intelligent human being that chick is, but you know, just constantly it comes out of her mouth is just so unimaginably, uninformed and ill-informed, but it works, right? It works to get an audience, and there’s an agenda there.”
O’Brien also took issue with “horse race” political journalism, the kind of coverage that she said focuses almost compulsively on public perceptions and does little to inform beyond a surface level.
“A great example of horse race journalism are the debates, right? How did someone come across, and not even necessarily, how did they come across to an audience that we're polling often? It's just—we feel this was a good zinger, or they seemed this way,” she said.
Such specious reporting, O’Brien said, is infecting war coverage.
“Does somebody seem like they’re winning? Do they seem upset? Do they seem pulled together? It becomes ‘How does it seem?’ versus, ‘Take us back 20 years, how did we get here? Who was involved? What were the decisions that were made for right or for wrong?’” she asked.
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