CNN's Stelter Compares Trump's America to Soviet Union: 'What is the Cost of Lies?'

CNN's Brian Stelter kicked off Sunday's edition of Reliable Sources by asking "what is the cost of lies?" Stelter noted that those were the first words of the HBO mini series "Chernobyl," which dramatized the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. After describing "secrecy, state deception, and endemic lying" as the main themes of Chernobyl, Stelter proceeded to compare the Soviet Union to Trump's America. He asked "what is the cost of lies," referring to the "dangerous, dangerous downplaying of the pandemic, outright...denialism coming from the President and his aides." According to Stelter, "The cost is trust. The cost is a collective truth and sometimes, the cost is human lives." Stelter also complained about Fox News choosing not to cover coronavirus enough, complaining that they "make these cities out to be disaster zones that they're not." The rest of the segment featured Stelter and his panel trashing Fox News and Trump for not taking coronavirus seriously enough, with Stelter referring to Sean Hannity's town hall with the President as "propaganda." At the end of the conversation, guest Kirsten Powers accused Fox News of "harming their viewers out of allegiance to Donald Trump."