Unbelievable

Thanks to Fox News lies, only 40% of Republicans consider COVID-19 a serious threat

As I wrote on Sunday, Fox News has done a rapid 180 in the way it covers the coronavirus. The network is desperately scrambling to convince its aging audience that the hoax corona flu its prime-time stars have spent the past two months laughing off is actually a deadly virus that could kill millions of Americans in a very short space of time.

But the challenge they face is YUGE.

Fox News viewers have long been trained to treat science, expertise and facts with contempt. And COVID-19 is no exception.

Thanks to the dangerous lies being pushed by Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham and other Fox News hosts—many of which were parroted by Viewer-in-Chief Donald Trump—the number of Republicans who are taking COVID-19 seriously has plummeted from 72% to 40% in just one month.

NPR @NPR

In a new poll, only 40% of Republicans say they think the coronavirus is a real threat — down from 72% last month. Poll: Americans Don’t Trust What They’re Hearing From Trump On CoronavirusAfter the White House downplayed the coronavirus threat in the past month, the number of Republicans saying it has been blown out of proportion jumped, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.trib.al

March 17th 2020

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As Paul Farhi and Sarah Ellison noted in the Washington Post on Monday, Fox News has been “a petri dish for misinformation about the disease.” The video in the link at the top of this post shows some of the most egregious examples of misinformation by Fox News hosts, side by side with their more recent attempts to repair the damage.

Yesterday, columnist followed Dana Milbank followed up with this in the Post:

For three years, President Trump told his supporters that the federal government perpetrates hoaxes and frauds, that the media produces fake news and that nothing is on the level except for his tweets. He did the same with the novel coronavirus, portraying it as an ordinary flu that would “disappear” and accusing Democrats of a hoax and the media of exaggerating…. After encouraging his Fox fan base for weeks to scoff at the virus, Trump now finds that his presidency, the U.S. economy and countless lives depend on him convincing them otherwise.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it took the personal intervention of a Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, to convince Trump to take the coronavirus seriously. (Ironically, this happened at a party at Mar-a-Lago during a weekend in which Trump was hanging out with at least three people who later tested positive for COVID-19.)

For now, at least, everyone at Fox News has got the memo. It’s no longer a “hoax.” It’s an “emergency.”

Hopefully, its viewers will be able to process this disturbing dose of reality before all the hospital beds run out.

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