NBC Finally Sticks Up for Reporter Who Told Truth About Fetterman’s Cognitive Troubles — Two Days Later

NBC News finally supported its reporter Dasha Burns two days after she reported the truth about Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman’s use of closed captioning that aided his interview with Burns.

After Burns reported Tuesday that Fetterman needed the crutch of closed captioning to have a conversation, NBC News refused to support Burns’s bombshell report until Thursday, the day after Breitbart News highlighted NBC News’s decision to cast doubt on Burns’ report.

NBC News’s Savannah Guthrie on Wednesday’s Today show had counteracted Burns’s report on Fetterman as speculative by suggesting Burns’s interview experience was an outlier among many others with the candidate. Likewise, MSNBC’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell had tried to protect Fetterman’s image Tuesday night by comparing the radical candidate to former President Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair.

Fetterman had a stroke in May and has not fully recovered. Five months later, he still struggles with auditory processing.

Despite NBC News’s decision to back its own reporter, the Associated Press, along with other media personalities, decried Burns’s interview on Wednesday. The AP seemed to warn members of the establishment media not to report on Fetterman’s health issues at the risk of excommunication with the press. “NBC reporter’s comment about Fetterman draws criticism,” its headline read.

“The way Burns handled that interview will only worsen attitudes and violence towards disabled people in a time when virtual accommodations are being removed left and right after they were implemented overnight in 2020,” Hill claimed.

Fetterman has defended his mental health and inability to properly function as a senate candidate by attacking Oz. “Oz lies about my health…That’s the real here,” he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid last week. “Dr. Oz also has a very very big difference in what really matters here as Democrats here in Pennsylvania too,” Fetterman claimed another time.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.