Fox News defended Jesse Watters on Tuesday after he used the phrase \u201ckill shot\u201d in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr. Anthony Fauci.<\/b>
\nNew York \u2013 Fox News defended Jesse Watters on Tuesday after he used the phrase \u201ckill shot\u201d 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 \u201con the spot\u201d but predicted he wouldn\u2019t be held accountable for his language. Fox said Watters\u2019 words had been \u201ctwisted completely out of context.\u201d Watters, a host on Fox News Channel\u2019s panel show \u201cThe Five\u201d who made his initial mark doing aggressive interviews for Bill O\u2019Reilly, spoke Monday to a group of college and high school conservatives. His audience booed at the mention of Fauci\u2019s name. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the government\u2019s 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, China, the city where the COVID-19 virus originated. He said an interviewer should suggest he lied about the topic \u2013 something Fauci has disputed. \u201cNow you go in for the kill shot, the kill shot with an ambush, deadly, because he doesn\u2019t see it coming,\u201d Watters said. He suggested an interviewer say, \u201cyou know why people don\u2019t trust you, don\u2019t you?\u2019 Oh, he is dead. He\u2019s dead. He\u2019s done.\u201d The interviewer should make sure the encounter is filmed and the footage given to conservative media, Watters said. It\u2019s a confrontation technique that has been used elsewhere in conservative politics by the group Project Veritas. \u201cJust make sure it\u2019s legal,\u201d Watters said. A partial clip of Watters\u2019 speech, beginning with the \u201ckill shot\u201d quote, spread around the internet, with some commentators suggesting that he had advocated assassinating Fauci. During an interview with Fauci on Tuesday, CNN\u2019s John Berman referred to Watters as a \u201cFox News entertainer,\u201d and asked about the comments without playing the clip, saying it was dangerous. Berman referred to a \u201crhetorical kill shot,\u201d and asked Fauci how much that language concerned him. Fauci noted that for two years, he\u2019s been encouraging people to protect themselves against COVID-19 by practicing good public health practices and get vaccinated. \u201cFor that, you have some guy out there saying people should be giving me a kill shot, to ambush me?\u201d he said. \u201cI mean, what kind of craziness is there in society these days? That\u2019s awful what he said. And he\u2019s going to go, very likely, unaccountable. Whatever network he is on is not going to do anything. The guy should be fired on the spot.\u201d Fauci, in a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d interview in October, discussed death threats he had received and his need for a security detail. In a statement, Fox said \u201cbased on watching the full clip and reading the entire transcript, it\u2019s more than clear that Jesse Watters was using a metaphor for asking hard-hitting questions &mldr; and his words have been twisted completely out of context.\u201d Watters\u2019 reference to \u201ckill shot,\u201d however, baffled some people in television news. \u201cI\u2019ve never used, or heard, that term used and I did my share of ambush interviews as an investigative producer,\u201d said Mark Lukasiewicz, dean of Hofstra University\u2019s School of Communication and a longtime journalist at NBC News. Last month on Fox, Tucker Carlson compared Fauci to Italian World War II dictator Benito Mussolini, while Lara Logan said Fauci, to some people, represented Josef Mengele, the Nazi death doctor. Fox has not commented on the statements that Carlson and Logan made about Fauci. Logan, a contributor to the Fox Nation streaming service who had appeared as a commentator on the television network, hasn\u2019t been on since.<\/p>\n