1. Fox News is promoting protests against social distancing measures. This is really bad.
mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-n…
mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-n…
2. Governors across the country have instituted stay at home orders and other social distancing measures. This has limited the coronavirus' spread, preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed and keeping the death toll from becoming truly nightmarish.
3. But that's come with a heavy price -- massive unemployment and economic destruction. Everyone wants this to end, it can't be the permanent condition. But public health experts say we need much more testing capacity than we have now before we can start safely reopening.
4. Trump, his political allies, and Fox hosts who support him want to skip that and just start reopening. And now activists backed by right-wing orgs are starting protests against the existing measures.
5. Wednesday saw the biggest such demonstration yet, in Lansing, Michigan. Fox hosts ran more than a dozen segments cheering the protesters on, gave softball interviews to the organizers, and expressed their hope that the movement spreads across the country.
6. With Fox's help, it will. Orgs that helped support the tea party in 2009 have formed a coalition to roll back social distancing measures and are promising major protest activity.
7. In 2009, Fox played a key role in getting out the message about the tea party, telling people where they could join protests, and generally talking the concept up. They can do the same thing with these anti social distancing efforts.
8. Social distancing relies on a certain amount of social solidarity to function. If it becomes politically polarized, enough people will stop doing it to curb its effectiveness.
9. Red state Republican governors will abandon social distancing, Democratic and blue state Republican ones will start facing intense pressure to do the same. A second wave will swiftly become inevitable.
10. Fox hosts have immense power to stop that from happening. If they tell their viewers this is a bad idea -- or even just starve the protests of oxygen -- they can stop them.
But they're not doing that.
But they're not doing that.
11. And if Trump sees enough of this coverage and endorses the effort, the hard-won progress we've seen in the fight against COVID could evaporate. #end
