(John Weingarten, Headline USA) Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake held what her campaign announced as an “emergency press conference” Thursday afternoon, during which she hammered mainstream media outlets for publishing a Jussie Smollett-like fake-news story about a break-in at the campaign headquarters of her opponent, Katie Hobbs .
.@KariLake team just sent out a media advisory for an emergency press conference happening this afternoon.
No other details were included.
— The AZ – abc15 – Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) October 27, 2022
Hobbs lodged unsubstantiated claims that a recent petty burglary at her campaign office was a result of “Kari Lake and her allies … spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit.”
At Thursday’s emergency press conference, Lake described outlets like The Guardian, NBC, Axios, and Newsy as carrying water for the Democratic party by widely publishing her opponents’ fake-news allegations 13 days before the election.
She also drew comparisons to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.
“You refused to cover the evidence that was on that [Hunter’s laptop] and this time it’s the other way around,” Lake said. “You’re taking absolutely bogus stories and running with it, it’s absolutely fake news.”
Lake, 22-year veteran anchor for FOX 10 Phoenix, went on to hammer her former news peers as irresponsible and corrupt for running her opponent’s accusations without proper fact-checking.
“She [Hobbs] put out a defamatory statement and you all ran with it,” Lake said. “You didn’t do your journalistic duty, it was malpractice of journalism like I’ve never seen before.”
It appears likely that the burglary was not politically motivated, as Katie Hobbs claims, because the police have arrested a man in connection with the burglary, Daniel Mota Dos Reis, who happened to be arrested the day before for a separate commercial burglary.
A recent FOX 10 poll shows Lake leading her opponent Katie Hobbs by 11 percentage points less than two weeks before the general gubernatorial election.
