Background Briefing: April 2, 2020
A Signatory of the Letter to the Owners of Fox to Stop Spreading Lies and Misinformation
We begin as we approach the peak of the COVID-!9 caseload in New York with the appalling news that New York is about to run out of ventilators just when they are needed most and will soon be needed a lot more. Instead of rising to the challenge, our disgraceful excuse for a leader is dissing our healthcare professionals (one of whom, an emergency room doctor in New Jersey, died from Covid today) of being “complainers” who “are never satisfied”, charging without evidence, they are selling hospital equipment out the back door. But as true and real as this growing crisis is and as derelict the leadership from Washington appears, you would never know it if you watched Fox News. But a reckoning of sorts is underway as the nation’s death toll reaches 5,000 so far, holding the Trump propaganda machine responsible for spreading lies and disinformation to Fox viewers who, if they follow Trump and the Murdoch network’s advice, will start dying in increasing numbers. One of 74 signatories of an open letter to Rupert Murdoch and Lauchlan Murdoch about Fox News’s irresponsible coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Feldstein, joins us. A professor and the Chair of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland, he is a two-time George Foster Peabody award-winning investigative correspondent formerly with CNN, ABC and NBC and we discuss the irony that the median age of Fox News viewers is 65, the very group most vulnerable to the virus. The letter attempts to hold to account a faux populist bilious billionaire tending his vineyard in Bel Air while Murdoch’s hirelings assure Fox viewers the pandemic is a “Democratic hoax” perpetrated by “our ruling class and their TV mouthpieces – whipping up fear over this virus”.