Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly has claimed that US news outlets, including CNN, are partially to blame for the Capitol riots due to their biased coverage.
Protesters stormed the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6 after Donald Trump made a speech which was considered to have incited violence.
Congress was forced to evacuate the building but later reconvened to count the electoral college votes and certify Joe Biden's as the next US President.
Kelly spoke to BBC's Newsnight on Saturday, after Biden's inauguration, where she condemned the media for their coverage of Trump.
"They hated him so much, they checked their objectivity, and it wasn't just CNN, all of them did. They just couldn't check their own personal feelings about him," she said in the interview, a clip of which was obtained by the Daily Mail.
"The media destroyed itself, but Trump certainly helped. He sort of set a trap that walked right into and it worked really well."
She said there had been a major shift in the coverage from CNN to how the news outlet portrayed Trump before and after the election.
"I remember listening to all of [Trump's] disparaging comments about CNN when he first became a national figure as a presidential candidate, and I watched a lot of CNN even though I was on Fox. And I was like this is unfair. CNN may be a little boring, but it's fair and it's factual. It's not biased against Trump. Then they spent the next four years proving him right - proving me wrong."
She said the bias in reporting was partially to blame for the Capitol riots, the Daily Mail reported.
"Part of the reason we saw what happened at the Capitol here two weeks ago is because there had been a complete lack of trust in the media, and people don't know where to turn for true information, they don't trust the media anymore. And it's a major problem."
However, her comments have had a mixed response on social media.
Journalist Hugo Lowell wrote: "I'm sorry but I've never heard anything so ridiculous as Megyn Kelly saying on BBC Newsnight that Trump mobs attacked the Capitol because they didn't trust the media - not Trump lying that the election was stolen".
But conservative commentator Darren Grimes said they were "spot on".
"The media poisoned the faith in them to present unvarnished news thanks to their blatantly biased coverage of Trump. Now, with Biden, the opposite will be true. There will be no objective scrutiny and reporting."
Kelly left Fox News in January 2017 after more than a decade with the news outlet.
She went on to join NBC, but less than two years later, she left over controversial blackface comments which were condemned on social media.
