Brian Stelter Shreds Biden Administration’s Covid Messaging: ‘The CDC Has Turned Into a Punchline’
CNN’s Brian Stelter chastised the Biden administration for the messaging failures leading people to ignore new Covid safety guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Stelter made his comments on Sunday during a Reliable Sources panel about the mental impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Stelter, at one point in the discussion, ask CNN media correspondent Oliver Darcy whether the media has become “out of touch” with the public on Covid.
Darcy concurred with that premise, describing the agency as “very out of touch with people” based on what he has seen around the country — resulting in much of the public tuning out the news and the information that the press is trying to disseminate. This prompted Stelter to bring up an interview NBC’s Savannah Guthrie held with CDC director Rochelle Walensky several days ago in which Guthrie asked about the online mockery the CDC has been getting for their shifting public guidelines.
Stelter opined that Guthrie was “very much in touch with the public” during the interview because she recognizes that “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
“It’s so sad, but it’s true, The CDC has turned into a punchline,” Stelter said. Noting that Guthrie called out the CDC’s “credibility crisis,” Stelter asked Darcy if part of the problem is people ignoring the “mixed messages” they hear from the CDC.
“That’s exactly right,” Darcy said. “We’re supposed to be getting information to these people, so when we’re messaging towards a very small group of people who are maybe taking the pandemic far more seriously than the average person, I think we’re not doing our jobs as effectively as we should be doing. I think we need to generalize the message.”
Stelter and Darcy’s comments came shortly after Walensky gave an interview to Fox News’ Bret Baier, in which she faced questions about whether the agency has a credibility problem.
Watch above, via CNN.
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