This is a total ethering of one of Fox News' go-to coronavirus "experts."
Alex Berenson has made at least 75 appearances on weekday shows since the start of the pandemic, 51 in primetime. He is "the Secretariat of being wrong."
Choice expert quotes grappling with Berenson theories:
"His point is absolutely stupid."
"The claim he is making is simply fearmongering."
"Actually, his argument is even worse than your analogy."
Berenson would just be a novelist with a Twitter account and strange ideas about pot if Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham hadn't decided to feature him in their paranoid coronavirus coverage and the Murdochs hadn't decided that was fine. mediamatters.org/coronavirus-co…
Anyway he's going to end up on Fox primetime whining about the fake news trying to cancel him because the network doesn't really care if its viewers stay alive.
Every media controversy these days feels more consequential because it's happening against the backdrop of a collapsing industry featuring heightened precarity for everyone who works in it.
Every HR and editorial policy shift at the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic is unusually important because they're rare lifeboats that are likely to weather the storm.
A change in a political magazine's leadership matters more because there are fewer places for writers whose work don't fit the scheme to go.
This sort of comment is actually good for Fox because they're more worried about winning back folks who drifted to OAN/Newsmax out of concern that Fox was insufficiently propagandistic.
Anyway time for more whining about how Peter Doocy isn't on "the list" for Biden press conferences. mediamatters.org/fox-news/reali…
I feel like I'm having trouble calibrating on this one because "priorities of WH reporters diverge wildly from those of the public" is such a deeply normal media problem.
I was working the Saturday morning shift back in 2013, watching Carlson's show at the time, Fox & Friends Saturday, when Walden, then the NRCC chair, came on for an interview.
At the time, the big story in Washington was the sequester, the mandatory budget cuts required under a deal between Obama and the Republicans. The GOP was trying to make hay over the stuff the Obama admin was supposedly cutting and not cutting.
Fox News spent virtually no time on Trump’s call for his supporters to get vaccinated, giving the comments roughly 6 minutes 30 seconds of coverage in the following 36 hours. mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-n…
Trump's comments were important because his supporters are the ones most resistant to vaccination.
But they'll only have an impact if those followers hear about them -- and Fox isn't doing its part to make that happen.
Fox has a particular responsibility here because its hosts have convinced viewers not to trust any other news source. That means that they're the best way for Trump's comments to reach that audience.