Despite Outbreaks Among Unvaccinated, Fox News
Hosts Smear Shots
Months after Rupert Murdoch got a Covid-19 vaccine
dose, one of his network’s stars, Tucker Carlson, called a Biden vaccination
proposal “the greatest scandal in my lifetime.”
Tiffany Hsu
By Tiffany
Hsu
Published
July 11, 2021
Updated
July 21, 2021
Back in
December, before the queen of England and the president-elect of the United
States had their turns, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch received a dose of a
Covid-19 vaccine. Afterward, he urged everyone else to get it, too.
Since then,
a different message has been a repeated refrain on the prime-time shows hosted
by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham on Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News Channel — a
message at odds with the recommendations of health experts, even as the virus’s
Delta variant and other mutations fuel outbreaks in areas where vaccination
rates are below the national average.
Mr.
Carlson, Ms. Ingraham and guests on their programs have said on the air that
the vaccines could be dangerous; that people are justified in refusing them;
and that public authorities have overstepped in their attempts to deliver them.
Mr. Carlson
and Ms. Ingraham last week criticized a plan by the Biden administration to
increase vaccinations by having health care workers and volunteers go door to
door to try to persuade the reluctant to get shots.
“Going
door-to-door?” Ms. Ingraham said. “This is creepy stuff.”
Mr.
Carlson, the highest-rated Fox News host, with an average of 2.9 million
viewers, said the Biden plan was an attempt to “force people to take medicine
they don’t want or need.” He called the initiative “the greatest scandal in my
lifetime, by far.”
Mr.
Carlson’s guest on that episode, the veteran Fox News political analyst Brit
Hume, pushed back slightly, saying, “What they’re trying to do is make it as
easy as possible for people to get the vaccine and, for people who are
hesitant, to perhaps encourage them that they have nothing to fear.” Mr. Hume
was quick to add that “vaccines do have side effects” and said those who are
hesitant “should be respected.”
Opposition
to vaccines was once relegated to the fringes of American politics, and the
rhetoric on Fox News has coincided with efforts by right-wing extremists to
bash vaccination efforts.
Served up
to an audience that is more likely than the general population to be wary of
Covid vaccines, the remarks by Mr. Carlson and Ms. Ingraham echoed a now-common
conservative talking point — that the government-led effort to raise
vaccination rates amounted to a violation of civil liberties and a waste of
taxpayer dollars.
The
comments by the Fox News hosts and their guests may have also helped cement
vaccine skepticism in the conservative mainstream, even as the Biden
administration’s campaign to inoculate the public is running into resistance in
many parts of the country.
Public
health experts have said that a strong vaccination effort is critical for the
United States to outrun the virus, which has killed more than four million
people worldwide and continues to mutate.
The
amplification of vaccine skepticism through conservative media channels could
harden the reluctance of those who might otherwise have been persuaded to get a
shot, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University
of Pennsylvania.
“If you
have constant exposure to an outlet that is raising vaccination hesitancy,
raising questions about vaccinations, that is something to anchor you in your
position that says, ‘I’m not going to take the vaccine,’” Ms. Jamieson said.
A Fox News
spokeswoman provided past statements by Mr. Carlson voicing his general support
for vaccines. “I’ve had a million vaccines in my life, as we all have,” the
host said on an April show. “I think vaccines are great.” The spokeswoman also
noted that Ms. Ingraham had spoken in favor of adults choosing to receive
vaccines if they wanted them.
White House
officials said on Thursday that virtually all new coronavirus hospitalizations
and deaths nationwide involved unvaccinated people. The five states with the
worst outbreaks as of Wednesday had below-average vaccination rates; four of
them voted for President Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election.
Vaccine
resistance was greater among Republicans than Democrats, according to an April
study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among Republicans who watch
Fox News, 45 percent said they were hesitant or unwilling to get a Covid-19
shot, compared with 68 percent of viewers who watch the niche right-wing news
channels Newsmax or One America News Network.
On his
Wednesday program, Mr. Carlson went after colleges that have required students
to be vaccinated before their return to campus.
“They
shouldn’t get the shot,” said Mr. Carlson, who has not disclosed whether he is
vaccinated against Covid-19. “It’s not good for them. There’s a risk involved,
much higher than of Covid, but colleges are forcing them anyway.”
His guest
for the segment, Charlie Kirk, a founder of the conservative group Turning
Point USA, compared the campus precautions to “almost this apartheid-style
open-air hostage situation, like: ‘Oh, you can have your freedom back if you
get the jab.’”
Infections
among younger people were a major factor in a surge last summer. When students
returned to colleges last fall, there was another Covid spike. A new variant
that spread rapidly in younger age groups filled hospital wards this spring.
Health experts have said for months that Covid is far more dangerous than any
potential risks associated with a vaccine.
During Mr.
Carlson’s surge in popularity, major companies, including Disney, Papa John’s
and Sandals, stopped buying ads on his show. In April, the Anti-Defamation League
called on the host to resign after he mocked concerns about “white replacement
theory,” which describes a racist conspiracy theory popular among right-wing
extremists, and accused Democrats of “trying to replace the current electorate”
with people he described as “new people, more obedient voters, from the third
world.”
The host
has had the unshakable support of his bosses. In a May interview with Insider,
Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son of Rupert, who runs Fox News with his father,
defended Mr. Carlson against his critics and called him “brave.”
As of July
4, 67 percent of American adults had received at least one shot, just short of
President Biden’s goal of 70 percent. Media campaigns to increase vaccination
rates, such as public service announcements from the nonprofit Ad Council, have
been addressed to hesitant Americans.
While two
of Fox News’s prominent hosts and their guests have questioned vaccination
efforts, the channel has also produced its own vaccine P.S.A., a 30-second spot
featuring the hosts and anchors Steve Doocy, Harris Faulkner, Dana Perino and
John Roberts. “If you can, get the vaccine,” Ms. Faulkner says in the ad.
Bret Baier,
the chief political anchor of Fox News, said in an Instagram post that he was
“grateful” for the shot. In May, the hosts of “Fox & Friends” spoke on-air
of their “relief” at getting vaccinated. And Ms. Faulkner hosted a prime-time
special in February that sought in part to “debunk common myths” about the
vaccine.
The
prime-time Fox News host Sean Hannity, who fell behind Mr. Carlson in the
ratings race during the Trump years, said on a May episode of “Hannity” that he
planned to get a Covid-19 shot. “I do believe in science, and I believe in
vaccinations,” he said.
“Talk to
your doctor,” he continued. “You don’t need to talk to people on TV and radio
that aren’t doctors.”
Ms. Ingraham
has been more skeptical. Last week she accused the news media of overhyping the
threat of Covid-19 to children and often refusing to discuss adverse reactions
linked to the vaccines, although such outcomes have been covered by The New
York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other outlets.
“Despite
everything the experts either got wrong or lied about, they still think that
parents should trust them and inject their kids with an experimental drug to
prevent a disease almost none of those kids will ever get sick from,” she said
on her show. Ms. Ingraham has not revealed whether she has received a Covid
vaccine.
While
children are less likely to develop severe illness from Covid-19, data from the
American Academy of Pediatrics showed that more than four million children had
tested positive for the coronavirus since the pandemic began, that more than
16,500 had been hospitalized and that more than 300 had died in the United
States.
Fox News is
not the only outlet that has been critical of vaccine efforts. Newsmax covered
Mr. Biden’s outreach plan on its website with the headline “Biden Blasted for
‘Sick’ Door-to-Door Vaccine Campaign”; One America News Network greeted the
proposal with the headline “Joe Biden To Send Operatives To Harass Americans Into
Taking COVID-19 Vaccines.”
Dr. Joshua
M. Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins, called the rhetoric
against vaccine campaigns “a terrible development.”
“We have
such strong political opinions in this country,” he said, “and if people associate
their political identity with a position on a public intervention, it’s very
hard to penetrate that with good information.”
The remarks
against vaccination efforts on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Ingraham
Angle” have come during a ratings resurgence for Fox News.
For years,
Mr. Murdoch’s channel was the ratings leader among cable news networks — only
to fall behind CNN in the wake of the 2020 election, when Fox News was the
first news organization to project Mr. Biden as the winner of Arizona, a key
swing state.
Newsmax,
which was more frankly pro-Trump in its coverage, gained viewers in the weeks
after Election Day. At the same time, One America News accused Fox News of
joining “the mainstream media” in an effort to recruit the channel’s disaffected
fans.
Now the old
ratings order has been restored: Fox News finished far ahead of its main
rivals, CNN and MSNBC, with an average of nearly 2.2 million viewers during
prime time in the second quarter of 2021, according to Nielsen.
Its return
to the top came thanks, in part, to a programming strategy that gave more hours
per week to opinion shows, rather than news broadcasts. And as it climbed back
to ratings dominance, the commentator Donna Brazile, a former Democratic Party
chairwoman, departed the network, and Juan Williams, a moderate pundit, left
his role as a co-host of “The Five.” Both had served as foils to the channel’s
conservative voices.
In a recent
opinion essay for The Daily Beast, Preston Padden, a former high-level
executive at Fox Broadcasting, wrote that Fox News had “contributed
substantially and directly” to “the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by
fueling hesitation and doubt about the efficacy and safety of lifesaving
Covid-19 vaccines.” He singled out the channel’s prime-time opinion programs
for blame.
Tiffany Hsu
is a media reporter for the business desk, focusing on advertising and
marketing. Previously, she covered breaking business news. Before joining The
Times, she wrote about the California economy for The Los Angeles Times. @tiffkhsu
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