Brainwashed By Fox, Some Americans Are Put at Risk. It's a Habit That Can Kill You.
April 2nd 2020
President Trump at the Fox News Town Hall (The White House)
By Chris Reeves
I was in middle school when my father came home from his job in 1984. A fairly conservative man, he would have described himself as an Eisenhower Republican. He voted for Kennedy. He was a Reagan Republican, but he was never a hardliner. He came home from his average workday and for the first time in years, I heard him curse: “If any of this is true, I’m not going to vote for a damn Republican again.” He was talking about Iran-Contra. That fire didn’t last very long, and he was able to move back to being a regular Republican.
It has been more than 30 years since then. The last few times I have been home, one network dominates the dial: Fox News. At the local retirement community, the same: the only show on the TV anywhere is Fox News, at all hours. In public spaces and beyond.
In an editorial written for the New York Times, Kara Swisher expresses a similar feeling:
But she was not concerned — and it was clear why. Her primary source of news is Fox. In those days she was telling me that the Covid-19 threat was overblown by the mainstream news media (note, her daughter is in the media). She told me that it wasn’t going to be that big a deal. She told me that it was just like the flu.
Swisher’s mother isn’t alone. In a Washington Post piece that was published today, it comes right back up—those who watch Fox News believed the story was overhyped, and still have doubts about COVID-19.
That’s striking: Nearly eight in 10 in the Fox group say the media has exaggerated coronavirus risks. By contrast, only 35 percent in the MSNBC group say this, while 54 percent in the CNN group do — which is high, but not nearly comparable with the Fox group.
What’s troubling about this is that as a general matter, the media mostly got it right in drawing intense and urgent attention to the coronavirus early on in a manner that Trump and his media allies did not.
These numbers, as the Post notes, were from mid-March. I’ve heard the same in my own state, from the same Fox News viewers. Why? Because the rhetorical shift came too late—and it’s already shifting again.
Fox News, who began by calling COVID-19 a hoax, then embraced it, then pointed out how great Trump was in handling it, and now they’re back on the attack, calling—as Trump does—for more attention to be paid to the economy over the virus.
People who tuned in on Monday may have been convinced that exchanging humans lives for better GDP and jobs numbers is a reasonable trade-off for policymakers to consider, or that unproven drugs can save them if they get sick.
My mother, a lifetime smoker in poor health living in a rural community, still wonders whether “this may be really overblown.” A local business owner told his employees in a meeting that they should stock up on the drugs that “the President recommended.”
Why do these things happen? It’s simple: Fox News sells fake news like a dealer, knowing that their users will rarely ask questions, and when they have to reverse themselves, they do it with no explanation.
None of us have any idea how this will all end. What we do know is what is moral and ethical. This is not it.
Posted with permission