MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace said Monday on her show “Deadline” that Fox News and other “right-wing media” are creating an “alternate reality.”
Wallace said, “I was off a couple of days last week. I tuned in to a little Fox News in prime time and was aghast. I mean, they are pumping flagrant lies into millions of viewers. They’re interviewing lunatics. They call them lawyers, not sure how many of them have law degrees, saying there are a million votes here, observers here. These cases have been filed. They’ve gone before judges that were Democratic and Republican appointees, and they’ve all been thrown out. Do you share president Obama’s concern about the alternate universe of fact-free information that’s being pumped into trump’s base?’
Network host Al Sharpton said, “We’re now in a nation where facts don’t matter. You make up facts. And not only do you have an alternative reality, how do you debate someone that is dealing with a totally fictitious premise? How do you debate a fantasy that someone wants to sell, and people want to believe? I think the danger of that is in the middle of having to engage and try to knock down fantasies. We put ourselves at risk to a foreign enemy or some enemy like a pandemic that is a natural disaster because reality is not going to spare fantasy.”
Wallace said, “I think about the White House in which I served. I think that the difference there because I was listening to President Obama, and I share his concern that the Bush administration was covered obviously more favorably on Fox News and far for critically on MSNBC and other platforms. But the story that led the news was often the same, particularly in the months and years after September 11th. You now have a true, a true alternate reality where there is literally no intersection in the stories that show up in right-wing media, and Fox isn’t the only one.”
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