With the coronavirus outbreak spreading across the country over the past several weeks, President Donald Trump has bragged that his daily press briefings at the White House are achieving Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers.

At one such briefing in mid-March, a reporter posed Trump a unique question. Major left-wing news media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese Communist Party narratives, and theyre claiming you are racist for making these claims about Chinese virus, she noted as the president chuckled.

Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels? And they work right here at the White House with direct access to you and your team?

The reporter, Chanel Rion, is not a household name, but Trump knew who she was. OAN, he said slowly as she began to talk, they treat me very nicely. Go ahead.

The White House coronavirus briefings have been a major boon for Rion and the fledgling, hard-right news network, which last year claimed to be available in around 35 million households. OAN, founded by a wealthy Republican donor, has an unmatched fervor for Trump, who has called on the network numerous times since his daily televised briefings began.

Elevating OAN in this manner has provided a president under intense scrutiny for a botched pandemic response an opportunity to find an extremely friendly interlocutor. Its also slowly mainstreaming a conspiracy-laden media network filled with a number of ultraconservative political actors who are not really journalists in any meaningful sense.