Fox hosts are relentlessly attacking the vaccination campaign against the coronavirus. Their nightly effort to delegitimize the vaccines is a big problem. mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-…
The vaccines are miraculously safe and effective against the virus and its variants. But if you watch Fox, you hear a stream of stories about how they may not work and may kill you if you take them, along with aggrieved rants about the Biden administration effort.
It didn't have to be this way. It’s easy to imagine a world in which Fox hosts relentlessly talked up how Donald Trump had made the vaccines possible and how if viewers got vaccinated, the dreaded masks and lockdowns would be gone forever.
But Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch has described the network as the “loyal opposition” to the Biden administration, and that includes the fight to vaccinate the public against the pandemic.
And now huge swaths of Republicans say they are not and will not be vaccinated. It's a culture war issue rather than a health one because that's the lens through which Fox presents the world to its viewers.
We're headed for a scenario in which Democrats are vaccinated and Republicans aren't, and a lot of Fox viewers end up dead because they listened to the network instead of getting shots.

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More from @MattGertz

7 Jul
It’s hard to assess Tucker Carlson’s NSA claim because he's a huge liar and often offers grandiose, conspiracy-minded claims about the forces arrayed against him that subsequently fall apart under scrutiny or die away. mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-w…
Can't trust U.S. intelligence agencies, it's totally plausible that something untoward or illegal happened, but also you can't trust Carlson because of the aforementioned lying.
One possibility experts have pointed to is that Carlson was communicating with a legal foreign NSA target and his communications were swept up in the agency’s routine surveillance of that person.
Read 5 tweets
7 Jul
I’m starting to think that the maximally effective strategy for getting Republicans vaccinated is for Democrats to gloat about how we’ll be able to do Marxisms after more of them they die of COVID. Negative partisanship is just too powerful.
Scolding and empathy both appear ineffective, but maybe they’d get shots out of spite. Fox might get more invested in keeping its viewers from dying under that theme.
Gotta “leak” secret audio of the Clintons and Obamas chortling over how dumb Republicans refusing to get vaccinated and dying of covid will allow them to bring about the fundamental transformation of the country or reparations or what have you.
Read 9 tweets
23 Jun
Per this release, the former president of the United States is (still) cold-calling Republican politicians when he likes something he sees them saying on his television. mediamatters.org/fox-news/gop-c…
How to catch Trump's attention, leading to a meeting that boosts your primary campaign against the sitting GOP governor.
This also shows how Fox is supercharging the GOP's "critical race theory" election strategy. GOP politicians respond to RW media coverage and take action on the issue, leading to favorable coverage of their campaigns.
Read 4 tweets
23 Jun
I took a crack at explaining the right-wing feedback loops that are generating scenes like this while turning local debates about school curricula into a polarized national issue. mediamatters.org/fox-news/feedb…
There are ~130,000 K-12 U.S. schools. As teachers and administrators grapple with how to discuss race and racism in the wake of 2020’s police killings and protests, it is inevitable that some will make decisions that are clumsy, ineffective, unpopular, or all of the above.
Such disputes have traditionally been managed between local stakeholders. But the right-wing strategy is to take as many of those instances as they can find, manufacture others, stretch them beyond recognition, dishonestly place them under the heading of “critical race theory.”
Read 7 tweets
23 Jun
Leader of 1/6 Truth movement on leader of 9/11 Truth movement mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucke…
Fwiw I generally don’t laugh at Alex Jones, I have contempt for the guy who said that “no one died” at Sandy Hook.
Anyway Tucker’s going to end up doing a Tucker Carlson Today interview with Jones and it’ll cause a stir and then Lachlan will say that actually Tucker criticized him and even though that will be obviously false Tucker will be fine because he’s Fox’s meal ticket at this point.
Read 4 tweets

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