Eric Alterman: Fox News Has Always Lied to Old People. This Time It May Kill Them.
Fox News Has Always Lied to Old People. This Time It May Kill Them.
The pandemic makes obvious what has long been true: Fox News is dangerous.
By Eric Alterman
Today 11:07 am
Fox News is not news. I have been saying and writing this since Rupert Murdoch launched the network in 1996, but today, it is more important than ever to understand. Fox is, and always has been, a right-wing propaganda outlet disguised as a cable news network.
Sure, CNN, MSNBC, and the network news programs are often filled with all manner of nonsense and misinformation. Indeed, Donald Trump likely would not be in the White House if Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, hadn’t aired Trump’s falsehood-filled speeches and hired know-nothing flacks to flatter the candidate in a mindless dedication to “bothsideism.” While other networks may be craven and insufficiently concerned with accuracy, Fox is different. It is specifically designed to disinform its viewers and distort our national discourse.
With the largest and most devoted audience in cable news, Fox’s commitment to deluding its audience has long been a barrier to intelligent discussion. Fox has devoted itself to climate denialism, racist attacks on immigrants, and the celebration of economic inequality to name just three. During its first two decades, Murdoch could depend on the late right-wing ideologue and television impresario, Roger Ailes, to navigate Fox’s ideological direction. But since Ailes’s 2016 departure following a bevy of sexual harassment and exploitation scandals, its unofficial program director has been Donald J. Trump.
During the Trump presidency, Fox has joined the president and the Republicans—and sometimes led him and them—in scapegoating the most vulnerable members of our society. But few Fox viewers have seen children caged and separated, often forever, from their parents. Few are victims of violent ICE raids.
What is different about the current crisis is that Trump’s unique combination of dishonesty, conspiracism, and rank incompetence are right in front of all of us. Everyone has friends and family members are losing their jobs or getting sick. This is not the kind of “he said/she said” situation where viewers have no vantage point to judge who is lying and who isn’t. This time, Fox’s misinformation is in our face. Eric Boehlert’s excellent newsletter, “Press Run,” points to just a few of recent examples of when Fox has “downplayed and minimized the novel coronavirus and assured viewers it was likely a partisan Democratic, ‘Deep State’ plot to take down Trump just like impeachment” as it was simultaneously “spreading blatant public health disinformation.”
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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/fox-news-coronavirus/
= new reply since forum marked as read
If they weren't so hell bent on undoing the previous administration, we would not have had a president who fired the pandemic response team because Obama did it. Now something that could have been just a blip has turned into a full blown, potentially unrecoverable crisis that has engulfed the whole planet. This is entirely on Fox. They can spin this all they want too, but it's entirely on them. And they will have to live with the consequences. 