Fox News host Jesse Watters this week slammed the mainstream media for allegedly reporting inaccurate news and claimed that "conservative media is basically saving this country."

In March, several media outlets, including the Washington Post, reported that counties that hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent rise in hate crimes compared to counties that did not. The outlets cited a paper written by three academics, Ayal Feinberg from Texas A&M University-Commerce, Regina Branton from the University of North Texas and Valerie Martinez-Ebers from the University of North Texas.

During a segment on Fox News' The Five, host Greg Gutfeld said Reason magazine independently "analysed the effects of Hillary Clinton's rallies using the framework" and found that "her rallies led to an even greater increase in hate crimes than Trump rallies."

"Right there, Reason just exposed what happens when junk science marries the media. It creates really stupid offspring," he claimed. Reason, an American libertarian monthly magazine, is published by the Reason Foundation.

The original study "had compared counties with rallies to others without them," Gutfeld explained. "Political rallies are usually held near large populations where raw crime numbers are higher. Big cities where rallies took place also had a few incidents of hate crimes, unlike smaller towns without rallies who reported no such crimes."

Later in the segment, Watters weighed in. "Professors actually aren't that smart," he said. "We hold them in this big, high esteem, and yes, some of them are doing groundbreaking work."

"They're mediocre minds and in this case, they're not even that book smart," Watters said. "Also, look how easy it is for fake news to go mainstream. You take a professor... the Washington Post gave them the opportunity to write this under the hard news banner as a legit article. And then everyone reads it. And then it gets on cable TV. And then politicians start talking about it. Very, very slick."

"Also, extrapolate this out for a second," he continued. "How many junk science studies have they done on global warming, on guns, on Russia. Think about all the other fake things that have gotten mainstream but a simple fact-check proves them wrong."

"Lastly, conservative media is basically saving this country. They're doing God's work. They are fact-checking The New York Times, CNN, they're constantly poking holes. It's exhausting," Watters added. "I think 75 percent of conservative media... all they're doing is rebutting the lies told by Democrats and the mainstream media."

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'Doing God's Work': Fox News' Jesse Watters Says 'Conservative Media is Basically Saving this Country' - Newsweek