A reporter for One America News Network asked President Trump if he thought the term "Chinese food" was racist during a line of questioning centering on the president's use of the phrase "China virus" to describe the coronavirus.

Chanel Rion, OANN's White House correspondent, asked the question of the president during Thursday's White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.

Rion, who spent part of her childhood living in South Korea, asked, "Do you consider the term 'Chinese food' racist because it's food that originates in China?"

"No," the president answered before she finished the question. "I don’t think it’s racist at all."

"On that note, major left-wing news media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese Communist Party narratives, and they are claiming that you are racist for making these claims about 'Chinese virus,'" she followed up. "Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels, and they work right here at the White House with direct access to you and your team?"

"It amazes me when I read the things that I read," Trump responded. "It amazes me when I read the Wall Street Journal, which is always so negative. It amazes me when I read the New York Times ... I barely read it. We don’t distribute it in the White House anymore. And the same thing with the Washington Post. Because, you see, I know the truth."

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Rion has made headlines this week for a report exploring claims that the virus may have been created in a laboratory in North Carolina. She cited Greg Rubini, whom she described in the report as “a citizen investigator and monitored source amongst a certain set in the D.C. intelligence community." In a social media thread outlining his theory, Rubini suggested that Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, personally funded the production of the virus.

OANN has previously faced criticism for false reporting. The network demanded retractions from the Daily Beast and MSNBC for claiming the network was Russian propaganda and even filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against MSNBC and Rachel Maddow.

Trump and his allies have faced accusations of racism and xenophobia for referring to the coronavirus as the "Wuhan virus" or "China virus." The president has insisted on using "Chinese virus" in public remarks and tweets, arguing that it is because the illness is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China.

Reporters have repeatedly asked about the controversy. On Thursday, for instance, Trump and members of his crisis response team were asked four different times during the coronavirus response briefing whether it was racist to call the disease the “Chinese virus.”

Although Trump said he does not blame China for the genesis of the COVID-19 virus, of which there have been at least 230,000 confirmed cases around the world, he has knocked Beijing for lacking transparency in its response.

“It could have been stopped, could have been stopped pretty easily if we had known, if everybody had known about it, a number of months before people started reading about it,” Trump said on Thursday. “It could have been stopped in its tracks. Unfortunately, they didn’t decide to make it public, but the whole world is suffering because of it."

This week, China banned journalists from five American media outlets in retaliation for Trump's decision to require Chinese state-run media organizations to register as foreign missions.