Quote:For Fox News hosts, the hydroxychloroquine controversy is fuel for the culture war
Tucker Carlson was in particularly high dudgeon Tuesday night, his brow wrinkled in rueful anger as he launched into a public scolding on his Fox News program.
“It is probably the most shameful thing I, as someone who has done this for 20 years, has ever seen,” he proclaimed. “It’s making a lot of us ashamed to work in the same profession as those people. So reckless and wrong in the middle of a pandemic, it really is, for real.”
The source of Carlson’s apparent regret? The fact that some “members of the media” — he didn’t offer any specifics — have criticized President Trump’s energetic touting of hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment.
Sean Hannity, whose program follows Carlson’s, was mad about it, too. The drug is showing signs of success, he said, “in spite of what the mob and the media is telling you,” he insisted Monday.
...“After hearing all of the stories where hydroxychloroquine is credited with saving lives, it is amazing that the left and the medical establishment is still in total denial about the potential of these decades-old drugs,” Laura Ingraham said on her program Thursday night.
...In touting the drug, Fox weekend host Jesse Watters denounced the “cherry-picking snakes, liars and backstabbing hypocrites” who have allegedly prevented people from receiving it. He added, “The president was hopeful but was savagely attacked in the media.”
...The framing of a fairly arcane medical question as a culture-war argument is part of a long pattern at Fox, where hosts often give “partisan cues” in discussing scientific questions, such as climate change, said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who has studied the network.
WP
This has seemed a very odd issue for Trump and Fox to focus on. It's easy enough to see how Trump, a deeply uninformed person, might be attracted to a snake-oil "remedy" which,
if it worked, would show him as a heroic savior. (And of course because he's a sociopath any negative consequences of widespread use would be of no importance whatsoever).
But he's been pushed by most at Fox to champion hydroxychoroquine and that's less simple to fathom. I think this reporting gets to a key motivation - promotion of and portrayal of the matter as a culture war matter that pits science/scholarship/expertise against "real down to earth Americans". That has always been a looming factor in Fox and right wing discourse.
Conflict gains eyeballs and thus advertiser dollars. For those "news" entities with no or few ethical boundaries, conflicts are created out of nothing (like the War on Christmas, as noted above). And such fake controversies do serve to distract attention from actual and important matters, like the Trump admin's failures right now. Obviously this forms part of Trump's motivations as well.
Really, it's just more gaslighting.
