Cotton: People Understand ‘They Can’t Take Everything the Media Reports at Face Value’

Monday on FNC’s “Fox News @ Night,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) criticized the media for its reporting on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, believed by some to have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The Arkansas GOP lawmaker noted the erosion of trust in the media because of the reluctance to report on matters that did not advance a narrative against then-President Donald Trump.

“I don’t find this surprising, though, because so many Arkansans have learned not to trust everything they read in the New York Times, they see on CNN. In the lab leak theory of the origin of the coronavirus pandemic is a good example of that,” he said. “I was pointing out at the beginning of last year in the very first days of this pandemic, most of Washington was obsessed with the impeachment trial. This virus didn’t start up in some remote mountain village next to a cay full of bats. It happened in a city that’s larger than New York, right down the street from the lab where they researched these coronaviruses.”

“And surely anyone with an ounce of common sense would say, well, gosh, maybe we should take a look at that,” Cotton continued. “And the media and the Democrats, because they saw the coronavirus as a way to attack President Trump and hopefully undermine his reelection dismissed rather saying is a fringe conspiracy theory, it’s something that been debunked when obviously, it had not been, every bit of evidence we had pointed towards that lab. That’s still the case to this day. Now that Donald Trump is no longer in the White House, so they’re willing to look at the facts as the facts and not exactly admit they made a mistake. But acknowledge the reality of it. And when normal Arkansans see that kind of duplicity from the media. And they understand that they can’t take everything the media reports at face value.”

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