FOX News is America's Shame

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K Graham
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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This right here is a perfect example of what's truly disturbing and immoral about FOX Noise. It doesn't really matter what a Democrat President does in any given situation, because the people at FOX have already dedicated themselves to attacking him for it regardless.

Fox News blamed Biden for not banning Russian oil. Now they’re criticizing him for doing just that.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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K Graham wrote:
Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:35 pm
This right here is a perfect example of what's truly disturbing and immoral about FOX Noise. It doesn't really matter what a Democrat President does in any given situation, because the people at FOX have already dedicated themselves to attacking him for it regardless.

Fox News blamed Biden for not banning Russian oil. Now they’re criticizing him for doing just that.
Fox News has cultivated an idiotic audience so that they can say any idiotic thing they want and maintain their audience. It is clear Fox knows its audience is full of gullible rubes.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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Hannity’s new lie is that he warned his audience about ivermectin

Fox News host Sean Hannity is now pretending that he consistently warned his audience against the use of ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that a constellation of right-wing personalities and grifters promoted as a COVID-19 treatment that a major study now shows is ineffective.

“People wrote this story, by the way, that I had been telling people [to use] ivermectin. Linda, is that not the one thing that I kept saying, there’s not a single study that I’ve seen that shows that it works?” he asked his producer on his nationally syndicated radio show on Friday. “One hundred percent,” she replied. He later suggested that his discussion of the drug was limited to hosting “guests on this program [who] mention it as part of their protocol; anecdotally they say it works.”

Hannity’s claim that he had waved his audience away from ivermectin is a bald-faced lie. In reality, last summer he sold his Fox and radio audiences out to the right-wing hucksters promoting the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. He repeatedly and recklessly touted the drug’s “incredible” promise as a COVID-19 therapeutic. While he claims now that he consistently said that not “a single study” shows that ivermectin works, at the time, he said that “numerous studies” proved that it did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHFrkCTBNs

Ivermectin became the alternative of choice for anti-vaxxers amid last year’s rollout of the incredibly effective COVID-19 vaccines. The drug drew support from right-wing social media fever swamps as well as from Fox hosts and other right-wing and contrarian media personalities. This push came despite a dearth of evidence of the drug’s effectiveness against COVID-19 and as U.S. and international health agencies and the drug’s own manufacturer warned against this kind of off-label use. Last month, a major clinical trial found ivermectin is ineffective in preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations, but this drew no interest from the Fox programs that had urged its use.

Hannity was one of ivermectin’s most fervent proselytizers to the Fox audience. The drug was mentioned at least 25 times on Hannity from December 2020 through early April 2022, good for the fourth-most mentions of any Fox broadcast. Hannity repeatedly told his viewers that ivermectin was one of several “incredible therapeutics” with proven effectiveness against COVID-19.

“We now have numerous studies about therapeutics, Regeneron, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, that show that taken early, it can mitigate symptoms of COVID-19,” Hannity said on his July 13 Fox show while criticizing federal guidelines that lifted mask requirements only for vaccinated students.

“We're also going to discuss something often overlooked and that is the incredible therapeutics that are now being used to treat not just breakthrough cases, but all cases,” he said on his August 2 broadcast. “That includes, yes, the [monoclonal] cocktail known as Regeneron, the Eli Lilly version of Regeneron. Even, yes, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin. You get to decide.”

Hannity added on August 6 that when President Joe Biden took office, “Therapeutics like Regeneron and ivermectin as well as other proactive treatments and practices were already helping COVID-19 patients all across the country.”

His most recent reference to the drug on Fox came on February 2, 2022, when he defended podcaster Joe Rogan for taking it after being diagnosed with COVID-19. At that time, Hannity contradicted his prior comments by saying, “I've never seen a study on ivermectin.” He has not subsequently mentioned the study published the following month that showed the drug is ineffective.

Hannity also pointed to the purported effectiveness of ivermectin on his national-syndicated radio show, which has a reported audience of 16 million listeners.

“There are people that don’t know about therapeutics, that I can tell you,” he said on May 18. “There are Americans that don’t know about Regeneron, ivermectin, HCQ, the studies that weren't rescinded from the medical journals,” he added, blaming “the media.”

Talking on June 28 to a caller who said she didn’t want to take “this COVID, quote, vaccine shot,” Hannity said, “We do have now incredible therapeutics that are getting widespread use, including Regeneron and ivermectin.” He added: “Look into ivermectin would be my advice. Look into Regeneron would be my advice. But again do all that, with the consultation of your doctor.”

“We have therapeutics we’ve never had before,” he said on July 8. “Turns out, many studies show that, taken early, hydroxychloroquine is effective at mitigating some of the symptoms of COVID. Then you hear of medicines and therapeutics like ivermectin. Then of course there's Regeneron, the monoclonal antibodies.”

Hannity’s false claim that he always warned his audience about ivermectin isn’t the first time he responded to criticism by lying about his COVID-19 coverage. In the early days of the pandemic, he repeatedly downplayed the risk posed by the virus, even claiming that some were “scaring the living hell out of people” in order to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.” But after he and his network came under fire, Hannity pivoted, claiming that he had “always taken the coronavirus seriously” and even threatening to sue The New York Times for suggesting otherwise.

But Hannity learned no lessons from that debacle and with ivermectin, went right back to failing his audience again.
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K Graham
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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Tucker: The Pentagon is lying about bio labs in Ukraine


Pushing Russian disinformation during a time of war. This guy needs to be arrested.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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UPenn law professor tells Tucker Carlson that “Blacks” and other “non-Western” groups harbor “resentment and shame and envy”

Wax then attacked Indian immigrants for criticizing racism in the U.S. when “their country is a shithole”
On the April 8 edition of his Fox Nation program, Tucker Carlson hosted University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Amy Wax for a discussion about her views on diversity initiatives in academia, during which she accused Black people and “Third World” immigrants of harboring “resentment and shame and envy” against Western people for their “outsized achievements and contributions.”

Wax has been on the receiving end of public criticism regarding a series of comments she’s made on race and culture. In a 2017 op-ed for The Philadelphia Enquirer, Wax had argued that “all cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Wax singled out certain groups, including “Blacks” and Hispanics for not conforming to what she described as “bourgeois” and “free-market” cultural values.

In subsequent interviews, Wax had doubled down on her assessment, stating that immigrants are attracted to “countries ruled by white Europeans” and affirming that she did not shrink away from describing those countries and cultures as “superior.”

More recently, Wax appeared on the podcast of Brown University professor Glenn Loury, during which she incorrectly claimed that she’d never seen a Black Pennsylvania Law student graduate at the “top quarter” of their class. In a subsequent defense of her interview, Wax argued that “the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.”

On Tucker Carlson Today, Wax once again defended her position as the two discussed her Loury interview. While defending her claim about Black students, Wax called affirmative action a “poison” infecting the well of academia.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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Fox’s flagship “straight news” show promotes bogus COVID study to boost Republican policies
Right-wing apparatchiks want you to believe red states outperformed blue states during the pandemic — after they literally rewrote the death statistics

Murdoch media outlets are promoting an economic report declaring that Republican-led states did better than their Democratic-led counterparts in the COVID-19 pandemic. But the supposed “study” is simply an engineered conclusion produced by a political front group, which gives extra credit to Republican policies to not implement public health guidance or restrict normal life. And on top of that, it manipulates the typically higher death rates in red states by artificially adjusting them downward, while dishonestly fabricating higher death statistics in blue states.

The report, with the grandiose title “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19,” is the brainchild of right-wing pundit Stephen Moore, along with conservative political organizer Phil Kerpen and libertarian University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. (Both Moore and Mulligan served as political appointees in the Trump administration.) The report was released through the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative group advocating the discredited principles of “supply-side” economics that has also promoted “pro-growth and liberty-based responses to COVID-19.”

The report, which is not peer-reviewed, also includes a note on the first page thanking Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “for his review of this study and his instructive advice.” Bhattacharya is a Stanford medical professor associated with the right-wing Hoover Institution, who has also informally advised Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) — a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2024 — and has appeared multiple times on Fox News and undermined the COVID-19 vaccines and public vaccination campaigns. Bhattacharya also co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a reckless libertarian proposal for loosening public health measures in the midst of the pandemic to achieve global “herd immunity.”

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

The study was touted on Monday’s edition of Fox’s flagship “straight” news program, Special Report with Bret Baier. A chyron on screen claimed, “Red states fare better on economic and health outcomes.” But as a close examination of the study reveals — briefly alluded to by Fox News correspondent Jonathan Serrie — this conclusion exists only after the authors made some creative adjustments “for age, obesity, and diabetes.”

The study was also promoted in stories on Fox’s website, as well as in the editorial pages of the network’s corporate cousins: the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNews.com and the New York Post both mentioned the metric of “age-adjusted death rates,” while the Journal was a bit more forthcoming in noting that the study also made adjustments for “the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths).”

The reports in these three Murdoch publications all pointed to the report’s praise of Florida as supposedly one of the best-performing states — a possible sign of Bhattacharya’s influence on both Florida’s policies and this report’s verdict. By contrast, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has run through numbers from health care analyst Charles Gaba, which found that Florida is actually one of the worst-performing states in COVID-19 death statistics, even accounting for the state’s older population.

Moore also appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Fox Business’ Varney & Co., during which he claimed, “The big takeaway is that the lockdown strategy was pretty much a total failure. … States that remained open did not have higher death rates from the virus than states that completely shut down.” Serrie later mentioned Moore’s study again, on Tuesday morning’s edition of America’s Newsroom.

Moore has built a career as possibly the worst economist in the media, making serially wrong pronouncements and false calculations in service of his political agendas. In March 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, only for Moore to eventually withdraw from consideration due to multiple controversies over his past political comments.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”
In order to arrive at the favored conclusion, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity report actually looked at more than just health outcomes. The group’s press release explains that it used three metrics for its findings — COVID-19 deaths, economic performance, and school openings — and declared they were “equally weighted” in the analysis. The result is that the question of saving lives accounts for only one-third of the calculation. The study also essentially just rehashes in pseudo-scientific form Moore’s long-standing contention that saving lives in the pandemic might not be “worth trillions of dollars of losses” and that simply allowing the virus to spread was “a better strategy” than enduring the economic costs of lockdowns.

The concept of age-adjusted deaths across populations is a tricky issue. While it is a legitimate line of inquiry, Fox News has exploited it ever since the start of the pandemic to create a nonchalant response to COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. Looking at this metric from a neutral source does show some interesting effects, but the ranks of worst-performing states would still be Republican-led ones such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Moore and his compatriots at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have gone even further, however, by setting up a new metric in the fine print of their supposed study. They call it an adjustment for “metabolic health” in different populations — “the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” But what it really amounts to is a manipulation of the statistics to declare that higher death tolls should be discounted in populations that were less healthy to begin with, and to act as if public health responses can be separated from the overall health of the public.

Much of the discourse around the role of obesity in COVID-19 deaths has framed it as “another ongoing pandemic,” and the role of diabetes has been addressed in media as a “public health train wreck” and evidence of “America’s diabetes crisis.” But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity instead treats these deaths as somehow a mitigating factor in the public health responses of the states most affected. It’s almost as if, by the standards of Moore and his co-authors, the deaths of unhealthy people are not a problem at all.

As a result of this statistical chicanery, death rates in the South and some other Republican-led states were magically revised downward, while deaths were “adjusted” drastically higher in many Democratic states — skewing the data to make blue states look like the worst offenders.

“NV, NY, New Jersey, and DC were the four states with the highest metabolic-adjusted mortality, even though none is in the top four without the adjustment,” the report says — as if that were a good thing for the authors’ credibility — because those four places all have obesity and diabetes rates that are below the national average. By contrast, in the real-world statistics they began with, the worst contenders were all red states.

Fox News has waged a two-year propaganda campaign against public health, in which it has lied about COVID-19 vaccines, promoted fake cures, encouraged the spread of the virus, and turned people defying public health measures into culture war heroes even as their actions have gotten them killed. Fox also clearly does not believe any of what it preaches — see its own corporate vaccination and testing policies — but the network nevertheless pursues this framing because it is “great for ratings.”

Who knows, perhaps the network will be able to come up with a study showing that watching Fox News is good for surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, once the analysts can adjust for the comorbidities associated with watching Fox News.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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Economists have been the worst profession at assessing the effects of the pandemic. Add in an extreme ideologue like Moore, and you get a great example of cherry picking factors until you get the result you want. Washington was one of the most aggressive states in terms of mask mandates and business restrictions. Our death rate is half that of what Florida reports. It's one third of what Mississippi reports. What this report actually argues is that the states whose governors knew they had the most vulnerable populations made the least amount of effort to protect them from the disease. The comorbid conditions that increased the risk of COVID infection were known in the first few months of the pandemic, long before Florida had its first wave. Not a good look at all.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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Res Ipsa wrote:
Thu Apr 14, 2022 4:31 pm
Economists have been the worst profession at assessing the effects of the pandemic. Add in an extreme ideologue like Moore, and you get a great example of cherry picking factors until you get the result you want. Washington was one of the most aggressive states in terms of mask mandates and business restrictions. Our death rate is half that of what Florida reports. It's one third of what Mississippi reports. What this report actually argues is that the states whose governors knew they had the most vulnerable populations made the least amount of effort to protect them from the disease. The comorbid conditions that increased the risk of COVID infection were known in the first few months of the pandemic, long before Florida had its first wave. Not a good look at all.
And shouldn't the rate of death be the only factor that matters? Otherwise it seems we're saying we're willing to sacrifice more lives if it means better economic numbers. Even California's rate of death (deaths per million) is substantially better than Florida's, and this is true even when using the fudged numbers DeSantis provides us with.

New York and New Jersey's death rate is worse than most red states because they're so concentrated. In fact New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the union.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

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K Graham wrote:
Thu Apr 14, 2022 5:34 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Thu Apr 14, 2022 4:31 pm
Economists have been the worst profession at assessing the effects of the pandemic. Add in an extreme ideologue like Moore, and you get a great example of cherry picking factors until you get the result you want. Washington was one of the most aggressive states in terms of mask mandates and business restrictions. Our death rate is half that of what Florida reports. It's one third of what Mississippi reports. What this report actually argues is that the states whose governors knew they had the most vulnerable populations made the least amount of effort to protect them from the disease. The comorbid conditions that increased the risk of COVID infection were known in the first few months of the pandemic, long before Florida had its first wave. Not a good look at all.
And shouldn't the rate of death be the only factor that matters? Otherwise it seems we're saying we're willing to sacrifice more lives if it means better economic numbers. Even California's rate of death (deaths per million) is substantially better than Florida's, and this is true even when using the fudged numbers DeSantis provides us with.

New York and New Jersey's death rate is worse than most red states because they're so concentrated. In fact New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the union.
I don't think that the COVID death rate is the only statistic that matters. But in the case of this "report card," it shows how hard the authors had to manipulate the numbers to get the result they wanted.

In terms of public health, I think the most important numbers will be the rate of excess deaths over the term of the pandemic and the rate of disability from sequelae. Excess deaths will capture both the direct and indirect deaths caused by COVID 19, as well as the direct and indirect deaths caused by public health measures taken in different states. We won't have to argue about the difference between "from COVID" and "with COVID" or speculate about increased suicides because excess deaths captures all death.

But we don't know either of these numbers yet, and we won't for a while. The CDC traditionally evaluates the full "disease burden" of an epidemic or pandemic after the event is over. I don't think anyone has any idea as to when this pandemic will be over. And determining what the sequelae actually are and their effect will take even longer. It will take the medical profession some time to figure out the long-term and permanent affects of COVID infection. We know it damages the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. Is that damage permanent or does it heal over time?

In terms of economic effects, it's far too early to even pretend to say anything intelligent, which is what makes this "report card" beyond silly. It's sole function is to try and shape a narrative before we have any good evidence. The pandemic has done economic damage far beyond the "lockdowns" that conservatives are obsessed with. The damage to our health care systems will take a long time to figure out. Airlines are still canceling flights because they can't staff them. The teaching profession has been gutted, and the damage there isn't finished by a long shot. We're letting COVID freely circulate among kids attending schools, which will inevitably have an effect on the number and quality of teachers as older, more experienced teachers are killed or disabled.

This "report cared" is like calling a basketball game sometime before halftime based, not on the actual score, but on a whole bunch of statistics that end up turning the team leading by 25 points into the loser.

As an aside, you shouldn't be shocked at the notion of trading lives for dollars. We do it all the time. The market constantly prices human life and health. Juries do it every day. The dollar is only a medium of exchange. The reality is, the more resources we devote to reducing COVID deaths, the more expensive it becomes to prevent the next COVID death. At some point, preventing the next COVID death means diverting so many resources that it will result in a non-COVID death. So, it's always sensible to weigh costs and benefits. That's not what the report card even attempts to do.
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Re: FOX News is America's Shame

Post by K Graham »

Recent audio tapes prove the Trump White House literally told Sean Hannity what to say on his show.

Being the lapdog that he is, he gladly took his marching orders and complied.

Fox is such an embarassment to journalism. Why are they allowed to call themselves news?
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