Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks as Federal Aviation Administration Acting Administrator Daniel Elwell, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt, and Department of Transportation Inspector General Calvin Scovel appear before a Senate Transportation subcommittee hearing on commercial airline safety, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, in Washington. Two recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, in Ethiopia and Indonesia, which killed nearly 350 people, have lead to the temporary grounding of models of the aircraft and to increased scrutiny of the FAA’s delegation of a number of aspects of the certification process to the aircraft manufacturers themselves. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

In a Monday appearance on Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) took aim at the corporate media for their biased coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak. He castigated the press for its continued efforts to politicize the pandemic to denigrate the Trump administration.

Cruz accused progressive journalists of rooting for a “disaster” that would damage the president politically. He referenced a tweet from Glenn Kessler, a reporter working with The Washington Post as an example of their use of the coronavirus as a political weapon. The senator responded to Kessler’s tweet with a post of his own:

The press HATED that, three months ago, we had the lowest African-American & Hispanic unemployment ever recorded. Now that we’re in the midst of a global pandemic—which originated in Wuhan, not the Oval Office—too many in the press are giddy with glee. #RootForAmerica https://t.co/JGb5mgHanT — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 5, 2020

During his appearance on Fox News, he said, “You see the media – much of the mainstream media was trying to root for disaster.” He continued:

“They’re rooting for this pandemic to be worse and worse. And you saw The Washington Post self-proclaimed fact-checker was cheering about a line from the State of the Union where the President said we had the lowest unemployment in 50 years. And The Washington Post was saying, ‘Well, that didn’t stand up well to the test of time.’”

Then, he went directly after Kessler. “Well, no, you moron,” he said. “We had the lowest level of African-American and Hispanic unemployment ever recorded until a global pandemic that originated in Wuhan came and ended up causing absolute chaos and catastrophe.”

Cruz then argued that “We should be coming together to root for America, to root for defeating this pandemic, to root for jobs coming back. And I think too many partisan Democrats want to just use this catastrophe to attack Trump rather than come together and fight for our country.”

The senator is right once again. After they downplayed the threat posed by the coronavirus, they pivoted to turning the outbreak into a political cudgel. Some seemed to hope that the pandemic would become Trump’s Hurricane Katrina. Left-leaning journalists engaged in brazen hypocrisy when they called conservatives racists for linking the virus to China even though their news outlets were doing the same previously.

None of this is surprising, of course. The COVID-19 is just the latest in a series of smear campaigns that the media has perpetrated since Trump took office. They are likely hoping that this outbreak will cause enough political damage to cost the president the election in November. But the fact that his approval ratings remain stable demonstrates that they are not fooling anyone.

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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