A total of four employees at Fox News Media have now tested positive for coronavirus. I’ll bet everyone at the network has finally woken up to the seriousness of the pandemic.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
Fox News Media confirmed that a total of four employees have tested positive for the new coronavirus, confirmed Saturday afternoon in a companywide memo sent to employees and obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.
"We just learned in the last 90 minutes that two additional FOX News Media employees have tested positive for COVID-19," Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox President Jay Wallace said in a memo obtained by Deadline on Saturday evening ET. "The total number of employees now affected stands at four, all based in our New York offices."
[…]
Fox will distribute more information as the situation develops. "We are a team all working for the same goal of performing a public service via our linear and non-linear platforms and we will all get through this together," the executives wrote at the end of the memo.
“Performing a public service” my you-know-what. The truth is Fox has been dangerously downplaying the coronavirus pandemic right up until the time that Donald Trump stopped doing so.
The propaganda worked, too. The Washington Post noted on March 11, “Recent polls suggest that [the rhetoric of Trump and his allies] has been effective at convincing many Americans that the coronavirus isn’t something about which they should be concerned. Or, at least, it was effective at convincing many Republicans.” Since then another poll has made that point more explicitly:
My god. https://t.co/5OzTfY2vhG pic.twitter.com/65IXsjmhls
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 18, 2020
Now it turns out that five Republican senators are self-quarantining:
THE SENATE is now 48 R -47 D
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) March 22, 2020
Sens. Lee, Romney, Scott of Florida, Paul and Gardner are all quarantining.
I never wish bodily harm on anyone. Nor am I in any mood to gloat. But maybe when their own get sick as a result of heeding propaganda over science, Republicans will start to realize they’ve been snookered by Trump and his lackeys on the air at Fox.
You can watch Sen. Rand Paul, who just tested positive for coronavirus, below, talking about his “optimism that this thing may plateau out within a few weeks and not be as bad as it may have been portrayed” on March 2. As far as I know, he is not the source of any contagion at Fox.
(H/T reader Eric Jefferson)
