Fauci: Fox’s Watters should be fired for comments on him
NEW YORK » Fox News defended Jesse Watters on Tuesday after he used the phrase “kill shot” in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci in public with a hostile interview.
Fauci, asked about it on CNN, said that Watters should be fired “on the spot” but predicted he wouldn’t be held accountable for his language. Fox said Watters’ words had been “twisted completely out of context.”
Watters, a host on Fox News Channel’s panel show “The Five” who made his initial mark doing aggressive interviews for Bill O’Reilly, spoke Monday to a group of college and high school conservatives.
His audience booed at the mention of Fauci’s name.
Fauci, director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the government’s most visible spokesman on the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the subject of frequent criticism by some Fox News commentators who have been seeking to appeal to audience members resistant to vaccinations.
Watters said that Fauci should be confronted on the subject of whether the National Institute of Health funded research at a lab in Wuhan, Watters said. It’s a confrontation China, the technique that city where has been used elsewhere in the COVID-19 conservative politics by the virus group Project Veritas. originated. “Just make sure it’s legal,” He said an Watters said. interviewer A partial clip of Watters’ should suggest speech, beginning with the he lied “kill shot” quote, spread about the topic — something around the internet, with Fauci has disputed. some commentators suggesting
“Now you go in for the that he had advocated kill shot, the kill shot with assassinating Fauci. an ambush, deadly, because During an interview with he doesn’t see it coming,” Fauci on Tuesday, CNN’s Watters said. John Berman referred to
He suggested an interviewer Watters as a “Fox News entertainer,” say, “you know why and asked about people don’t trust you, don’t the comments without playing you?’ Oh, he is dead. He’s the clip, saying it was dead. He’s done.” dangerous. Berman referred
The interviewer should to a “rhetorical kill make sure the encounter shot,” and asked Fauci how is filmed and the footage much that language concerned given to conservative media, him.