During the last year of the Trump presidency, CNN’s coronavirus tracking graphic informed the world nearly 24/7 about the climb in cases and deaths, but under President Biden, that policy appears to have changed, despite cases hitting over one million per day mark this week.
Following President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made headlines when he noted that the CNN tracker seemingly disappeared under the new commander-in-chief. In response, the network asserted that the tracker remained in use, but only for segments about the coronavirus.
The excuse did not address the fact that the tracker seemed to appear on the network’s screen nearly around the clock during the last eight months of the Trump presidency, serving as a constant reminder of the pandemic’s horrors. Later, a CNN staffer confirmed to Project Veritas in a secretly recorded video that the network would rely on the coronavirus pandemic for high ratings.
“COVID? Gangbusters with ratings, right? Which is why we constantly have the death toll on the side, which I have a major problem with, how we’re tallying how many people die every day,” CNN Technical Director Charles Chester told Project Veritas in the video.
Chester even said that the “the head of the network” (presumably CNN President Jeff Zucker) would sometimes demand the coronavirus tracker be on display again,even after the network would take it down. Chester explained:
I’ve been in the room many times where my director tells me to take it down, and I take it down, and then we get a phone call, the batphone rings in the back, literally a red phone, like the special red phone rings, and they pick it up and this producer picks it up … every so often they put it on speaker, and it’s like the head of the network being like, ‘There’s nothing that you’re doing right now that makes me want to stick, put the numbers back up, because that’s the most enticing thing that we had.
Nearly one year after President Biden’s inauguration, the coronavirus has now reached over one million new daily cases, and while the tracker has still appeared periodically on CNN, the network has not displayed it at nearly the same rate as it was under President Trump. People on social media took notice:
Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University recently showed that daily coronavirus cases totaled 1,082,549 as of Monday.
“The new daily tally brings the total number of cases confirmed in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic to 56,189,547. In total, the virus has caused at least 827,748 deaths across the country,” noted CNBC on Tuesday. “The record single-day total may be due in part to delayed reporting from over the holiday weekend.”