Dem Witness: GOP Members, Media 'Complicit' in Coronavirus Deaths

Kristin Urquiza, the cofounder of Marked by COVID, said during a committee hearing on media bias  Wednesday that Republican lawmakers and the media are complicit in hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths.

Urquiza spoke during a hearing on “disinformation and extremism” in the media.

Urquiza blamed then-President Donald Trump for hundreds of thousands of deaths that resulted from the coronavirus pandemic.

“The primary person and entity responsible for my father’s death and hundred of thousands of people in the United States is Donald Trump and his administration,” she said.

Urquiza continued, contending that Republican lawmakers and the cable news media remain complicit in spreading the 45th president’s misinformation.

She said:

However, crime and malfeasance are not committed by a single actor; frequently there are accomplices, enablers, and complicit parties. To the people in this room and this sacred body that blindly followed the president without questioning who put party over country, you and your colleagues are enablers. The media and particular cable news, you were complicit. These actors may not have pulled the gun that pointed at my father’s head, but they indeed drove the getaway car.

Urquiza said that her father, who died of coronavirus, received much of his news, which includes news about the pandemic, from Fox News.

The Marked by COVID founder described Fox News as a “propaganda machine.”

She argued that the spread of Trump’s “disinformation” allowed the coronavirus to “thrive” and for “hundreds of thousands of people to pass away.”

“Cable news channels like Fox News are complicit,” she emphasized.

“However, other news institutions are at fault, too; it wasn’t until after the Woodward quotes debuted that the media started to list the President’s falsehoods as lies,” she added. “Free speech scholars argue that for a democracy to function, informed debates and the marketplace of ideas must work off a shared set of facts.”