

“The Fox News vaccine requirement is stricter than the one proposed by President Joe Biden and described as ‘tyranny’ and ‘creeping communism,’” Hayes said.

On Wednesday night, Carlson’s mysterious personal relationship with the COVID-19 vaccine led MSNBC host Chris Hayes to call out the Fox News star. To me, they are all people who work for Fox News Media, and I respect the privacy of those conversations.” I am loyal to everyone on the team, whether they are someone on the news side or the opinion side. “I will never discuss those conversations.

“I have a regular cadence of conversations with a wide variety of talent here, including our prime-time talent,” Scott said when asked about Tucker Carlson. But in a rare interview granted to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who acknowledged that she is vaccinated, refused to discuss the rhetoric of the network’s leading anti-vaccine voice. If the vaccination rate is too low, new variants can emerge more frequently, potentially with resistance to existing protections.Over the past six months, Fox News personalities have used the network’s platform to liken vaccine mandates to apartheid, accused the Biden administration of using vaccine requirements to banish “sincere Christians in the ranks” of the military, and otherwise undermined the efficacy of vaccines nearly every day. Most estimates indicate that for vaccinations to offer population-level protection, at least 70% of people have to take them. It's a dynamic that has has doctors concerned. She also cautioned that it was difficult to attribute such behaviors directly to Fox News, since "Fox viewers are also likely consumers of other conservative outlets." Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who is an expert on right-wing media, told Insider in an email that "there is an association between reliance on such outlets as Fox and Limbaugh and belief in conspiracy theories about COVID -19." The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh died of complications from lung cancer this month. A study by researchers at the University of Southern California published in October found that they were less likely to observe restrictions designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.Ī working paper by economists at the University of Chicago last year found that in areas where many people watched Hannity, who consistently downplayed the importance of virus in its initial months, there were larger numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths.įox News pushed back on the conclusions of the Chicago study, pointing Insider to a statement given to The Hollywood Reporter that called the study and others cited as "nothing more than a transparent PR stunt by organizations seeking media attention." They characterized him as a provocateur and entertainer, voicing opinions outside the liberal consensus.īut studies conducted over the past year have found that Fox News viewers do seem to take the claims of its top-rated hosts about the coronavirus seriously. In response to a defamation lawsuit in September, Fox News attorneys successfully, if surprisingly, argued that Carlson should not be taken as a serious source of fact. Fox News viewers less likely to take virus precautions, study finds The person did not disclose the specific results or the methodology of the survey. The Fox News representative also mentioned an unpublished YouGov survey from December that they said found increased willingness among GOP-voting Fox News viewers to get a vaccine in comparison with other Republicans.
