Dear media, stop interviewing celebrity 'experts' about Covid-19

In an attempt to squeeze the Covid-19 crisis for all its worth, networks like CNN are letting agenda-driven celebs such as Sean Penn and Stephen King exploit the situation to promote themselves as offering real expertise.

Even quarantines in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak have not been enough to keep celebrities from virtue-signaling and preaching to the rest of the world. 

From bizarre renditions of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ to messages from their mansions and hottubs shaming others for daring to live lives during this pandemic, one could even argue celebrities are more insufferable right now than they have ever been.

What makes matters worse is a mainstream media that can’t get enough of it. Not only do they want to cover every celebrity’s coronavirus messages with puffpieces, but they also want to prop these people up as experts that we should be listening to. 

CNN, in their attempt to milk any and every angle on the coronavirus, has turned to both Sean ‘Jeff Spicoli’ Penn and author Stephen King, both coincidentally notoriously critical of the Trump administration, for words of wisdom in this trying time. 

In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Penn — who has described Trump as an “enemy of mankind” — appeared to be propped up as some kind of military expert based on his charity work in places like Haiti. He mumbled his way through the segment and encouraged the US military, which he describes as a “humanitarian force,” to take control of the country’s response efforts against the spread of the virus.

Imagine that. The same guy who made his name starring as a stoner in the 1982 comedy ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ is now being given center-stage on a major television network to encourage giving the US military more power and control over citizens. You can’t make this stuff up.

And speaking of making stuff up, CNN host Brian Stelter invited writer Stephen King — who has said Trump’s presidency is “scarier” than any horror novel he’s ever written — on his show over the weekend to criticize the US government and talk about how he predicted a mess just like this because he wrote a book about a pandemic once upon a time, dontcha know?

“Just in the last three or four weeks people are saying to me, ‘We are living in a Stephen King world,’ and boy, all I can say is I wish we weren’t. This has been waiting in the wings for a long, long time,” King said in reference to his 1979 novel ‘The Stand’ which is technically about a pandemic wiping out most of the population, but it just ends up being a wacky supernatural tale about good versus evil.  

The author spent the rest of the interview criticizing the Trump administration for being “unprepared” for a pandemic like the coronavirus.

“The fact that nobody really seemed prepared still mystifies me,” the government expert said. By the way, King just so happens to have a new novel dropping in a few weeks…

Celebrities, emboldened by hubris, preaching to the rest of the world while spewing uninformed opinions is nothing new, but the coronavirus is presenting a dangerous opportunity for the media to feed these egos. 

With every industry affected by Covid-19 and the virus being pretty much all anyone can talk or think about, media coverage is fairly narrow-minded at the moment. This one-track coverage has led networks like CNN to turn to people who are, quite frankly, in no way qualified to be talking about such a pandemic while it’s happening, and instead of simply tweeting away and having their opinions go into the haystack of endless information on social media, they are being looked to as ‘experts’ of some sort on what are supposed to be news programs. 

Without proper qualifications or specific knowledge, these interviewees only feed into hysteria. We already have to deal with woke celebrities building their profiles off the back of a global crisis; the last thing we need right now is the media entering a dangerous dance where they inject these knuckleheads with false authority and let them use airtime to drone on and on about their uninformed takes on the coronavirus. If the very experts are still trying to understand the virus and are offering updates every single day, why would any reasonable person believe celebrities would be any more informed than the rest of us?

Inviting agenda-driven celebrities on to push party-line politics and uninformed hysteria all under the guise of having coronavirus expertise is blatantly dangerous and unhelpful. Skip the celebs and stick to the real experts, CNN. 

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