Media Bias: CNN's Sciutto says Trump 'essentially checked out, barely mentioning the virus'

With the Neutral Zone Infraction, Just the News tries to do its part to maintain the line between fact and opinion in American journalism by blowing the whistle each week on an egregious example of slanted coverage by reporters. This week's offender: Jim Sciutto.

President Trump "is essentially checked out, barely mentioning the virus," CNN Chief National Security Correspondent and anchor Jim Sciutto asserted during a recent television monologue about the president and the coronavirus pandemic. 

During the segment, Sciutto highlighted several clips of President Trump expressing the idea that the virus will eventually cease to be a problem.

"I think that at some point that's going to sort of just disappear, I hope," Trump said about the virus during an interview. 

Sciutto later showed several other clips where the president appeared to convey similar sentiments.

"It's going to disappear, one day it's like a miracle it will disappear ... it could get worse before it gets better, could maybe go away, we'll see what happens, nobody really knows," Trump said in one clip.

In another clip the president said that "it's dying out," and in another the president remarked, "It's fading away, it's going to fade away.

Sciutto then opined: "And though he has not said so out loud, it seems to be his justification at the end of the day for not taking the kind of steps that any other presidents have taken in the grips of their own national crises. The president, as you know, calls himself a wartime president on this, yet he seems not to notice that more Americans have died in this battle than in all the wars since World War II." 

Sciutto continued: "He is essentially checked out, barely mentioning the virus in fact, focusing instead on things like this: People allegedly vandalizing statues, posting their pictures like he is something of a crime show host, demanding the culprits turn themselves in or else. Or attacking New York's mayor, calling a proposed Black Lives Matter mural there on Fifth Avenue, quote, a 'symbol of hate.' Ironic for someone who just recently tweeted out to tens of millions of followers a video of someone shouting, very clearly at the beginning of that video, 'white power.'"

Sciutto during the monologue failed to mention that the video was eventually removed from the president's Twitter feed and that a White House spokesman indicated in a statement that Trump "did not hear the one statement made on the video."

Sciutto's remarks that the president "seems not to notice" the large number of dead Americans and his comment that Trump "is essentially checked out" regarding the coronavirus crisis represent agenda-driven conjecture and opinion rather than straight news reporting.

CNN did not respond to a request for comment on this article.