A Media Matters study found that the two days Fox put aside its COVID disinformation propaganda were days it focused on another anti-Biden message: the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
While Fox has a vaccine mandate for its own employees, 90% of whom are vaccinated (including, obviously, the too-cowardly-to-admit-it Tucker Carlson), it won’t stop trying to scare its viewers out of getting vaccinated. Apparently, vaccinated-since-December, 2020 Rupert Murdoch is just fine with promoting death and disease for his viewers for the sake of his anti-Biden politics – and it’s great for ratings!
Media Matters crunched the numbers of Fox News' anti-vaxxism since President Joe Biden’s inauguration and found that the network aired anti-vaccination material at least once on 94% of the days from January 20 – September 30,. Those efforts intensified further into Biden’s presidency, rising from 80% (57 out of 71) of days between January 20 and March 31 to 99% (181 out of 183) between April 1 – September 30.
The two days from April through September when there wasn’t an effort to undermine vaccinations came amid overwhelming coverage of the final days of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in late August and early September, when discussions of the vaccination efforts were put on the back burner. From March 27 to August 28, Fox undermined the vaccination each day for 155 straight days.
Of course, Fox's intense coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal was little more than an excuse for the network to blame the whole tragedy on Biden - and absolve Donald Trump and George W. Bush. As abhorrent as that was, it's little compared to a concerted campaign against protecting public health and safety.
I found this article about white nationalist Derek Black’s evolution away from white nationalism very interesting. Basically, it started when he was included in a Jewish Shabbat dinner. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-black/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html
TLDR: The meat is that inclusion and welcoming him into a social circle he would have abhorred worked. I’m not saying you should befriend every MAGA lover you see and God knows I won’t but I do try to be kind. I think that kindness is contagious, just like cruelty is.
But that’s for every day people. People in power are a different story and we lefties need to be much fiercer in our condemnation on the public stage, IMO.
And also, every single one of them has to lose bigly in the next elections.
And yes, the point of pushing the anti-vaccination approach is to make sure that the pandemic continues as an unsolveable problem all the way past the midterms and up to the 2024 election. Idea being to say that Joe Biden wasn’t good enough to solve it, and that a re-instated Pence White House (likely with Ron DeSantis or someone close to him running the policy) would save everyone.
I note that the reality of the Biden White House has been an obvious and marked improvement over the disaster of the prior 4 years. In short order, we had far greater access to vaccination, and far more constructive work being done by governmental agencies, leading to a significant economic improvement over where things were left by Pence and his childish spokesman. We’ve also had much greater international stability. We could point to the mess in the Afghanistan exit as a low point, but this would have been the case no matter who the President was – and the fact is that we should never have been there for ten minutes in the first place, let alone 20 years. But you won’t hear about that reality on Fox News or AM Radio – they don’t dare admit it.
Whatever one says, most Americans actually do believe in the traditional values and I expect them to come to their senses and wonder what the heck happened. When (not if) they realise how they’ve been “played” by the likes of Fox(not)News, the latter will be toast. Although it will be hard for me to forgive them for their gullibility, I firmly intend to do my best to do so.
I have no sympathy for them any longer.
There’s simply too much video and print evidence for them to hope to convince the general public that the GOP did NOT do everything in its power to promote the suffering and death caused by what even Hannity has called the worst pandemic since 1918-19.
