by Gene Collier
Among this week’s harvest of factoids I unearthed looking for other factoids is that next month — Oct. 7, to be precise — marks the 25th anniversary of the birth of Fox News.
As for gifts, what should we get for the network to mark such a significant milepost?
Dunno. What has it gotten us, other than killed, I mean.
Look, this won’t exactly be the first essay suggesting that Fox News is getting people killed with its disinformation on the vaccine, on masks, on science, on the virus, all pumped 24/7 through the distorted prism of what Fox founding father Rupert Murdoch thinks the media ought to be doing.
At the journalism school I went to, I don’t remember any of the professors saying explicitly, “Look, try not to get anybody killed,” but I left there feeling confident that it had at least been implied.
And Fox News knows it’s getting people killed, which is why its audience is suddenly watching a crisp about-face from some of its more prominent personalities.
“Please take COVID seriously; I can’t say it enough,” said Sean Hannity, the prime time blatherer who has been described as Donald Trump’s Svengali. “Enough people have died. We don’t need any more death. … Take it seriously. It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.”
Morning show co-host Steve Doocy, suddenly self-aware that his network’s interminable anti-vax messaging was effectively killing off its own audience, said: “Look, the pandemic right now is really just with the people who have not been vaccinated. Ninety-nine percent of the people who died have not been vaccinated. … If you have the chance, get the shot — it will save your life.”
Monday afternoon, with many of their regular stars on holiday, the cable news channels were running out the jayvee teams. I decided to flip on Fox to see whether they were still stuck on the critical race theory outrage, the open borders scandal or the Afghanistan dereliction, but COVID had the stage for the moment. My main rule for Fox watching was in play: Watch until somebody says something that is just flat wrong, inordinately stupid or borderline incendiary (typical stay: 30-45 seconds).
Over another chyron setting up Dr. Anthony Fauci as a national punching bag, the anchor was introducing a reporter for a story about confusion over COVID booster shots by saying that when it comes to the vaccine, the White House messaging is still unclear.
I guess when the president of the United States goes on television and says, “Please, please, please get the vaccine,” that’s somehow unclear. I was gone in 16 seconds.
For COVID advice that’s perfectly clear, one would suppose you’d have to tune into Tucker Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated host. No one sews more distrust in the vaccine or eviscerates public health policy on masks than the man whom Variety awarded the media label “frozen food heir turned paleo-conservative firebrand pundit.” If there’s an origin story as to why nearly half of Republicans are unlikely to get the vaccine, Tucker Carlson directed it.
The irony there is that it was Carlson who in March 2020 left his Gulf Coast mansion to drive across Florida, owing to a deep sense of “moral obligation,” to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for the express purpose of convincing him to take the emerging coronavirus more seriously. Without that two-hour meeting, there might never have been Operation Warp Speed, the Trump-accelerated vaccine ramp-up that gains reliably over-the-top praise on Fox as it just as reliably instructs its viewers not to take it. Carlson is a person who essentially can’t even believe himself, working for a network that most of the time does not believe what it’s saying.
Trump, Murdoch, Hannity, all vaccinated. Carlson, asked if he was vaccinated by Time’s Gillian Laub, called that question “super vulgar,” then asked Laub, “What’s your favorite sexual position, and when did you last engage in it?”
It wouldn’t do to call that retort sophomoric. Why insult the sophomores?
Fox’s blatantly irresponsible COVID coverage has long since attracted the attention of people who like to count things. Media Matters, for example, issued a report in August that said between June 28 and July 11, less than two weeks, “Fox personalities made 216 claims undermining or downplaying vaccines or immunization drives. Out of those, 151 claims came from pundits on the network, which represented 70% of the total. Fox pundits described vaccine efforts as coercive or dangerous 75 times.”
Broadcast executive Preston Padden, who worked seven years at Fox, said recently that Murdoch “owes himself a better legacy than a news channel that no reasonable person would believe.”
Gene Collier is an award-winning columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has written about sports, politics, and social issues at newspapers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia for 28 years.
