Nobody has been more critical than I of the diabolical way Fox News has spent years propagating anti-American propaganda.
You’d never know it today, but Fox News used to be de-facto state TV -before Trump’s dystopian presidency made being so politically inconvenient. Specifically, no cable network provided more jingoistic coverage of the American military or more unconditional support for law enforcement authorities.
Watching Fox News anchors champion the domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 was bad enough. But even worse was watching them peddle lies – complete with Orwellian doublespeak – to discourage viewers from taking Covid vaccines they themselves had already taken.
But host Tucker Carlson took the cake when he called General Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a pig. This, because Milley explained to Congress why teaching critical race theory is just as important as teaching communism at US military academies.
While reading the July 26 edition of Business Insider, I came across a report on Carlson’s piggish insult, which passes for perfectly acceptable commentary on Fox News these days. I was moved to comment as follows:
Actually, Tucker is not the problem. Like Trump before him, he’s just a performing monkey. Producers just feed a few headlines, which are like ripe bananas to him, and off he goes.
No, the problem lies with his bosses, the Murdochs. Ask yourself what vested interest they have in sitting by and watching Tucker destroy core American values (like basic respect for those who risk their lives to defend our country) in ways that would give Vladimir Putin wet dreams.
And, trust me, this is only the tip of the iceberg of comments and commentaries I’ve written denouncing Fox News to no avail, including most recently in “Treated Like Pariahs in America, Fox-News Murdochs Flee to Australia,” April 8, 2021.
But the Delta variant of Covid-19 has become such a pandemic among the unvaccinated who regularly watch that network, it appears to have changed things.
Fox News has been one of the most prominent platforms for skeptics, even critics of the COVID vaccines. And yet in recent days, several Fox News personalities seem to have gone out of their way to affirm the importance of getting the vaccine.
(NPR, July 20, 2021)
Nevertheless, a few unrepentant ones are persisting. Which is rather like some Fox News anchors being forced to swim in the shallow end of a public swimming pool knowing full well that a bunch of idiots are continually peeing in the deep end for fun.
The irony, though, is that viewers don’t seem to care that Fox News has been lying to them about a vaccine that could save their lives any more than supporters seemed to care that former President Trump was lying to them about a virus that could kill them.
Mind you, this is hardly surprising. After all, those viewers and supporters are such easy marks because most are evangelicals, respectively.
I am the son of an evangelical preacher man. So I know firsthand that, even before Trump, these folks spent their whole lives listening – as if their lives depended on it – to pastors who were telling them the biggest lie ever told, namely that Jesus is coming back any day now to take them to Heaven.
And, sadly, reports abound about evangelicals abandoning religion for politics as an article of faith. And it’s self-evident that many of them listen to anchors on Fox News on TV every day with as much devotion as they used to listen to pastors in church on Sundays.
That explains the proselytization of Covid misinformation, and why Covid has been raging so disproportionately among viewers of Fox News. Indeed, as I’ve been obliged to explain on a few occasions, refusing to recognize the Trumpian politics that make red states far more unvaccinated (especially if you’re poor and uneducated) is rather like refusing to recognize the Trumpian politics that make red states now far more undemocratic (especially if you’re Black or Hispanic). But the facts are what they are.
Related commentaries:
Murdochs…