Charlie Hurt: Public ‘Increasingly Ignoring’ Media When It Comes To Trump

Fox News contributor and journalist Charlie Hurt said Wednesday that the public is out of sync with much of the national media regarding President Donald Trump’s current job performance.

A new Gallup poll found that 49% of respondents approved of Trump’s overall job performance while 60% approved of the way he has managed the coronavirus crisis.

“I think [the public is] increasingly ignoring [the media],” Hurt told Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.”

“I think that over the past three or four years … the public has very much moved away from listening to the media, but it’s become far more profound now that we actually have a life and death situation that the president is trying to grapple with,” Hurt said, referring to the growing COVID-19 pandemic. (RELATED: President Trump’s Approval Ratings Hit All Time High)

“You don’t get elected leader of the United States of America by becoming an epidemiologist,” Hurt insisted, saying a president cannot be a single-issue expert but must work to earn the votes of all Americans.

“I’m sure there is plenty of disagreement and discussion going on between the president and his top advisers, but that’s the president’s job. It’s to listen to all of these different people. He’s supposed to listen to his epidemiologists and clearly he does,” Hurt said.

But the journalist said Trump also has to listen to people who provide economic advice and he “clearly” is doing so, in order to make “the final decision.”

“What the American people see in the president right now is somebody who is genuinely grappling with these issues and making adult decisions about them.” (RELATED: Gallup: Satisfaction With Race Relations Has Jumped 14% Since Trump Took Office)

Poll results would seem to confirm Hurt’s analysis. More Americans agree with the way the president is managing the coronavirus crisis than they do with the way the media is reporting it, according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday.

Fifty percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance while 45% disapprove, the poll indicated. The same survey found that 45% of Americans gave a thumbs-up to the media’s approach to the pandemic, with 43% giving a thumbs-down.

The New York Times recently savaged Trump’s reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak, writing that his “performance has put on display the traits Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring: the profound need for praise, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny. For years, skeptics were critical of how he would handle a crisis facing the nation, and now they know.”