Fox News’ coronavirus response is just the latest evidence that they don’t care about anything
Aux Features TV
Fox News has a lot of blood on its hands, but, most of the time, the path from inciting hatred through a constant bombardment of deranged broadcasts to the development of real-world policy, violence, and bigotry is abstracted enough that the network can claim innocence. Its hypocritical coverage of the coronavirus, however, illustrated in a nauseating compilation of time-stamped comparison videos curated by the Washington Post’s The Fix, paints an extremely clear picture of just how dangerous Fox’s talking points actually are in recent, real-world terms.
The video begins on March 9 with Trish Regan doing one of her community theater-style monologues about how pandemic warnings were part of a petty attempt to impeach Trump. It then switches over to a clip from her show that aired a few days later (just after the White House addressed the nation), where, suddenly, Regan urges the country to test “for the virus in order to stop the spread of it.” The video continues on with these kind of examples, each spaced out to show Fox News’ line shifting from COVID-19 being a “hoax” to a legitimate threat that could, y’know, kill a lot of people.
Clips from before and after Trump’s position shifted show various hosts moving from dismissing the virus as less worrying than the seasonal flu to calling it, as shown in angry ghoul Jeanine Pirro’s change of blackened heart, “an incredibly contagious and dangerous virus.” On Monday, March 9, rectangle-headed dipshit Sean Hannity gets angry about anyone “using this virus,” which isn’t as deadly as “the standard flu,” as “a political weapon.” The next Monday, March 16, he tells viewers how important the quarantine is as a collective effort to halt its spread. Worst of all, Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt tells her audience on Friday, March 13 that the pandemic made it “the safest time to fly” before changing course yesterday with a comment about our “responsibility to slow down this virus and to think of other people during this time” through social distancing.
Of course, the difference made by a few days of taking the outbreak seriously or not matters tremendously when it comes to halting the spread of a highly contagious virus. Because Fox News treated the pandemic lightly—encouraging its audience to dismiss it as unimportant or a hoax—it encouraged others to do the same.
[via Digg]
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88 Comments
UK, Australia and the United States have all elected dumbass right-wing populists over the past decade.What do these countries have in common? Rupert Murdoch shaped their news industries over the last 40 years.
You’re not wrong, but how does that theory account for all the dumbass right-wing populists popping up everywhere else in the world as well?
Success breeds imitators.
Shouldn’t the credit go to Putin, then? He’s been doing it longer and better than any of ‘em. (Which, again, is not to absolve Rupert Murdoch’s blackened husk of a soul in the slightest.)
Murdoch was hard at work back when Putin was just a KGB officer stationed in East Germany. Murdoch has been running the GOP long before Russians started trolling the US. Putin is bad, but nobody has come close to what Murdoch has done, not the Kochs, not the Mercers, not Zuckerberg.
Yep. Putin wouldn’t have been able to so successfully manipulate American voters if they hadn’t been primed for 30 years by conservative media blowhards.
Putin: Doing it longer and better!
Old age and stubbornness.
Many of them are bankrolled by the same scumbags who bankroll the populists in the larger countries.
Three-fourths of the globe’s people are exposed to at least one Murdoch-owned form of media every day. This figure comes from the documentary film Outfoxed, which came out in the mid-2000s. It’s likely much worse now.
That Vladimir Putin is willing to run a bar tab for all of them?
Huh? What about Brazil, Japan, Phillipines, Turkey etc. Calm down there
You got it on one, as everyone knows the most dangerous place on earth is Australia where everything is out to kill ya. Rupert Fucking Murdoch, the sum total of everything evil Australia could muster, without a doubt the most dangerous and destructive human on earth.
Boris Johnson is arguably to the left of Obama. Ignorant, tribal crap like this is why morons like you destroyed the Labour party.
They take their cues from trump. When that idiot finally realized it was serious and started taking it seriously, they did too. They pretty much exist to prop up whatever opinion trump has that day.
And ironically, Trump takes his cues from Fox News. Which pretty much explains the never ending feedback loop of increasing stupidity we’ve been subject to for the entirety of his term.
January: Astronomers Detect a Binary Star Set to Explode, And You Might Be Alive to See It
March: Political Scientists Detect a Binary Star Set to Explode, And You Might Be Alive to See It
It’s sorta like this, except agreeing instead of fighting.
Interesting bit of trivia. What do Jared Kushner, Vladimir Putin and Rupert Murdoch all have in common? A mistress by the name of Wendy Deng. After the Republican presidential convention Jared and the Mrs. vacationed in a luxury yacht off the coast of Croatia with Vladimir Putin’s mistress. There are picts to prove it.
Too bad all the Picts died hundreds of years ago.
They are fun to groove in a cave with, especially if you’re one of several species of small, furry animals gathered together.
(insert that damn Captain America meme here)
this is NOT a deep cut i expected to see this early in self-isolation
Love you for this, been grooving to Pink Floyd last couple of days.
Umma glad I get this obscure reference.
PUNS?!?!? This is The Final Cut, I’m outta here…
We’re finally talking about Huns on here?!
Go cry to your atom heart mother!
I thought we were doing social distancing?So more like Wish You Weren’t Here.
Wasn’t Deng also the contact for Ivanka when she was performing her “bag man” duties delivering cash bribes for the Trump Baku (Azerbaijan) project?
Yup
It is known. https://splinternews.com/meet-wendi-deng-the-evil-genius-who-hangs-with-ivanka-1793861207
Accurate, but horrifying.
From the NY Times article you linked:Her monologue ran at the same time that the anchor Tucker Carlson, on his Fox News program, was exhorting elected officials to respond more aggressively to the virus. “People you know will get sick; some may die,” Mr. Carlson told his audience, which is significantly larger than Ms. Regan’s.Off the air, Mr. Carlson has been urging Mr. Trump to take the threat of coronavirus more seriously. Last Saturday, Mr. Carlson drove from his residence in Florida to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, and spoke directly with Mr. Trump about the virus, according to a person with knowledge of their conversation.Holy shit, how bad are things at Fox that Tucker “Never Met a Dog-whistle He Didn’t Love” Carlson is the voice of reason?
Someone he personally knows probably got it. It’s the only thing that gets through to those people.
Nah, just taking it more seriously allows him to put his signature racist spin on it. He’s taking the pivot and driving it to it’s logical (for him) extreme.
Eh, I bet he read Newt’s letter. AND realized he could get Trump to co-sign by pivoting to calling it the “Chinese Virus” because Trump loves new ways to be racist.
That’s racist.
Most of my family are those people, so I can say it.
It’s not “those people”, it’s “those peopah”!
He’s a white nationalist worried about older white people (who also happen to be his whole audience) dying off and being “replaced”.
That’s the only reason I am surprised it took Fox News this long to change course. I guess kowtowing to Trump is more important than anything else, but somebody at the network had to realize the people most likely to die in the pandemic are their core audience.
“Flus! Will not! Replace us!”(Fortunately sanitizing devices is in vogue, because now it feels like this tablet needs it.)
So the opposite of this?
It’s that and this virus plays into Carlson’s white nationalist ideals of being able to blame minorities and close all the borders.
He also went rogue in beseeching Trump to deescalate things with Iran earlier in the year. I guess these were the two times the broken clock was right.
Oh, you didn’t know? Let me tell you something: Tucker Carlson is on some long game shit. Trust me. He knows what he’s doing.
I watched 35 seconds of Tucker Carlson’s show last week, as they were starting the right wing campaign to label it the Chinese Coronavirus. And he’s just going off about how “governments lie,” mostly referencing China, but also to SPECIFICALLY stating that he’s talking about China. And I don’t expect most Fox viewers to be masters of subtlety. So it seems like a really bad time when local, state, and federal government agencies are trying to tell people how to stay safe, to come out and spout the “governments lie!” line. Which is really the problem with Fox News and the GOP in general- their whole goal is to have a non-functioning federal government, and when the shit hits the fan domestically and you can’t bomb another country to fix it, no one’s gonna trust the government.
Hasn’t stopped him from clearly identifying it as a Wuhan or Chinese virus.
The switch from “The coronavirus is overblown liberal media hype meant to hurt Trump, and Trump is right not to be taking drastic, unnecessary action over it no matter what the deep state liberal Democrats say” to “The coronavirus is a massive, dangerous problem, thank God that Trump recognized that early on and took massive action even as the liberal media and Democrats fought him” has somehow been both massively jarring and completely expected.
We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Shit, what am I supposed to do with all of these “Down with Eurasia” signs?
I’d hold onto them for a while.
TOILET PAPER!
‘Down with Eurasia’ signs?!Boys, we got an agitator here!
simple, just flip it over and write your “Down with Oceania” … $1 please
Wipe your ass with them.
You don’t have any “Down with Eurasia” signs. You never had any “Down with Eurasia” signs.
I think you mean Fantasia.
Ukraine is still strong, yes?
When my Floridian 80 year old Dad admitted it was real, my first thought was, “Aha, so Fox has flip-flopped on this.”
And naturally not a single one of those fuckwits even hinted at any sort of apologia.
The “Trump acted quickly and decisively” narrative from Fox News viewers was flummoxing to me at first, but then I realized that since they weren’t covering this seriously at all, a lot of their viewers really had no idea that this might be a big problem until Trump’s Oval Office address.
Maybe two weeks ago I was watching the news on YouTube TV, and the live feed guide actually plays several channels at once. So I could see CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC all playing at once. CNN and MSNBC had, of course, coronavirus stories. Fox News? Talking about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
It’s probably going to work as well. Remember that Joe Biden guy? It’s been a while since we heard about him and that other dude and that thing they were doing.
This is Republicans perfectly distilled.When it doesn’t effect them: Ugh. Figure out for yourself, and you shouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place.When the same thing happens to a loved one: This is a serious issue that the government should be fixing, and we shouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place because government messed up. [Still not willing to drop the supremacy of ideology even for loved ones.]When it happens to them: Everyone who doesn’t alter their entire life to help me is heartless!!!
Don’t call it socialism if it’s me who’s getting government help. That’s called “stimulus”. Government isn’t the solution to all problems, just mine.
We socialize failure and privatize success. A few years from now they’ll all be back to “the government doesn’t work! kill big government! I’ve never taken a handout in my life!!”
Years?? Try six months.
Nah, this won’t be over in six months.
Optimist!
You forgot the major first step. Blame Obama for everything.
And when everyone alters their entire lives: It’s the Chinese’s fault! Get em!
It’s not that at all. Well, not primarily. The pandemic’s importance was denied until it became unavoidable at which point it became an opportunity to demonstrate strong leadership. Earlier, it was a way to reflect back anti-intellectual and isolationist principles. Now it’s a way to show how daddy is taking care of us all so we should re-elect him.
They must have finally realized that the people most likely to die from it are their primary audience/money source.
lemme tell yoau sumin, y’allit be Soc’lisn, pure an’ simple-like
They have also reported that first dog has died from it. The dog was 16 by the way.
Well clearly that’s because the elderly are at greater risk.
On the one hand, I guess I’m glad they finally changed their tune so that now my dad might actually take me seriously about this? But on the other, fuck them so very much.(It is ridiculous, the shift, though. One guy I was begging/pleading with to take this seriously a week ago literally went from “it’s my god-given right as an American to to out to restaurants” to “i was watching Fox News and it is starting to seem like this virus is a big deal” OVERNIGHT. Then he implored me to “keep politics out of this” after calling it a “Libtard Hoax,” so, you know, that’s fun. (in case anyone is wondering why I was even bothering to engage, he’s a neighbor who I was trying to prevent from putting our mutual, very elderly neighbors at risk.)
Anyway, know what’s really super fun and in no way terrifying at all? Reading the report from Imperial College that actually woke Trump’s ass up about the need for social distancing and shutting down events. I hope you all really, REALLY like the people you live with.
It kind of makes you feel like you’ve gone mad, doesn’t it? Like, “I must be insane, because the entire world can’t possibly be this dumb.”
Ohh, if the years 2015-now have taught me anything, it’s that they can all really be this dumb.
May the whores of the empire lie awake in their beds
And sweat as they count out the sins on their heads
It doesn’t matter to Fox News. They’re already saying that liberals and Democrats were hoping this pandemic would happen so Trump would lose the election.
The right wing has stated on numerous occasions that they are *at war* with the rest us. They see everything as a possible weapon in their war. They see lies and slanders and deliberate disinformation as perfectly acceptable tools. If this virus was targeting young Hispanics instead of elderly GOP voters they’d be cheering the virus on and calling it ‘God’s will’.
FOX bad, AV Club gooooood…
Fox News does care about one thing: money. They have their niche amongst media outlets and must keep up the bullshit to keep getting eyeballs from their key demo on the screen so they can sell ads and make their publicly traded parent company money.Don’t kid yourselves. CNN and MSNBC do the same thing with a different demo. All media is designed to make everybody hysterical and panic daily so that they keep watching to see how fucked we should think we are. All the hysteria is designed to keep your eyes on the TV so they can sell ad space.None of these news channels would exist if they lost money for their parent company. No one watches the news to hear that things are pretty hopeful and mostly good. Regardless of which way you lean, no medium is providing accurate, bias-free news. Your news medium of choice has spent more money than God figuring out how to keep you watching/reading. Your eyeballs are the product and they are always working to figure out how to make as much money off of you as possible.
We have always been at war with Eurasia
We have our congressman Don Young, calling it “Beer Virus”. Hope one of his cronies coughs on him.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/19/politics/alaska-don-young-coronavirus/index.html