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The Fox News vaccine jihad is still going strong

Published on 12 Comments on The Fox News vaccine jihad is still going strong

Media Matters reports that Fox News has kept up its drumbeat of anti-vaccine disinformation:

One of the favorite defenses of Fox News is that stuff like this is only part of the prime time opinion programming, not the straight news reporting. But that's not so:

The network’s opinion programming aired 349 vaccine segments during this time period. Of those, 74% included claims undermining or downplaying immunization efforts. Fox’s “news” shows aired 279 such segments with 39% of those undercutting vaccines.

The news shows are less obvious about their agit-prop, but they join in with gusto. In fact, the coordination of news and opinion shows into a smooth whole is one of the unique features of Fox News.

12 thoughts on “The Fox News vaccine jihad is still going strong”

  1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    After FOXnews bowed to pressure from the Chavista anarchosocialists at Dominion Voting, they had to redouble their antivaxxxia to prove to themselves they weren't slackening in their commitment to the lamestream.

  2. rick_jones

    I went to follow the link to see what the definition of undercutting was (undermining being their term) and I am guessing these:

    In a six-week period from June 28 through August 8, Fox aired 628 coronavirus vaccine segments with 59% of those including claims undercutting immunization.
    Overall, Fox personalities and guests voiced 840 claims undermining or downplaying the immunization effort.
    Forty-seven percent of vaccine segments included claims suggesting that immunization efforts were coercive, represented government overreach, or violated personal freedom or choice.
    Thirty-three percent of segments included claims suggesting that vaccination was unnecessary or dangerous.
    Ten percent of segments included claims politicizing immunization efforts as a cynical ploy by Democrats to win elections or to take undue credit for the vaccine rollout.

    are the ones (modulo the remaining percentage not included in that part of the report) They give a little more detail later in:

    Overall, during the six-week period from June 28 to August 8, Fox described immunization efforts as coercive or government overreach or framed them with a false dichotomy of “personal choice” against “medical freedom” in 298 segments, or 47%. Personalities and guests on the network argued against vaccination or highlighted extremely rare medical complications in 210 segments, or 33%. Finally, Fox aired claims suggesting that vaccination efforts were a cynical political ploy by Democrats or a Democratic attempt to steal credit for the vaccine rollout in 65 segments, or 10%.

    There is a great deal more about methodology in the report which is worth a read.

  3. typhoon

    Somewhat unrelated, but I figure someone reading this will know…we know breakthrough cases for the vaccinated are rising, but hospitalizations and deaths for that population are still very low as a percentage of all cases. Are there stats on how many people who previously had original Covid and are not vaccinated are also getting infected with the Delta variant and, if so, are they getting infection at the same rate and intensity as the unvaccinated/no previous case population?

    1. Clyde Schechter

      We will probably never be able to answer that question. There is no way to know with confidence whether a person previously had Covid unless they were tested for it. Since we never developed a population-based surveillance program for this disease, the only Covid infections we know about are those that came to medical attention. If a person develops Covid now, we can ask them whether they had it before, but that information may be quite inaccurate. And given that a person is currently infected, we can't rely on blood antibody tests to tell us if they were previously infected.

      By contrast, vaccinations are registered in state databases, so we know who has and has not been vaccinated with almost complete accuracy.

  4. skeptonomist

    It's not likely that Fox is really convincing huge masses of people by misinforming them. Most people do watch local and national network news and get real news from them and other non-biased outlets - the correct information is available. At this point the procedure on the right is: chose sides first, then give reasons. Fox and other right-wing sources tell people which side is the party side on issues like vaccines and masks, and also give them pseudo-reasons for their positions. Few people are going to say "I refuse to get vaccinated because refusing is the cult position", they will say if asked "I don't believe the safety has been proven" or "the vaccine will implant a chip that will turn me into a Marxist". Even if people take the (phony) attitude that they value individual freedom they must still have a particular reason to refuse vaccination, and Fox supplies some pseudo-scientific reasons.

  5. Citizen99

    When can we all stop beating around the bush and say what we all know to be true: FNC, other RWM, and the R Party for the most part are pushing anti-public health measures because they know it will cause suffering and death while Joe Biden is president. And they know that the feckless mainstream media will ignore the source of the misinformation and simply follow their despicable journalistic practice of characterizing the suffering and death as "trouble for Biden" because it is happening "on his watch."
    In other words, the right is eagerly killing people for political advantage. As long as there are no consequences, why stop?

  6. royko

    Fox "straight news" programs are heavily integrated with the opinion programming, so that they basically tee it up for their stars. They report a story about a rare vaccine complication, they turn it over to Hannity to talk about why vaccination is a dangerous failure.

    Last year I spent a lot of time having to re-explain to my Fox-watching parents that Covid was worse than the flu. Just yesterday they told me they'd heard Delta was less deadly -- just like the flu. I am so sick of having these arguments.

  7. Jimm

    Another thing to watch out for is the emerging nexus of Fox News mainstreaming disinformation propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times and Washington Beacon (of course who dash a mix of truths and untruths to further the disinformation narrative, not necessarily with an acyclic attribution flow either).

  8. HokieAnnie

    My sympathies. I guess I should be grateful that my parents don't watch FOX, they have been Democrats since JFK. But their calls about how to work stuff on the computer, phone and TV sometimes get to me 🙂

  9. painedumonde

    Has there ever been a case of in-depth investigation into a media empire such as Fox? C'est-à-dire, when are the Murdoch Papers going to come to light?

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