Even in the Alternative Universe of Fox News, Ingesting Bleach Is Not a Great Idea

Fox news has been an extremely effective messaging arm of the Trump presidency. Some might say there would be no Trump presidency if not for Fox News. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has been a steady propaganda arm through Trump’s many screwups and foibles. Serving as a kind of alternative universe to the "mainstream media," Fox has gotten the president out of numerous jams and happily explained away his most incendiary statements. It even created a caravan of illegal immigrants marching its way toward the country's southern border right before the midterm elections, a caravan that then magically dissipated once the election was over. Some say that if Richard Nixon had Fox News in his corner he would never have needed to resign.

But few things have been harder to message—even for Trump's most loyal messenger—than the president's incredibly botched response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Propaganda and public health are a dangerous mix. The Spanish flu (which, despite its name, may actually have originated in the United States) was made considerably worse because the American government tried to censor coverage of it. As Walter Shapiro wrote in The New Republic last month, even though more than 195,000 Americans died in a single month in 1918, "President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with a war in Europe that would end on November 11, made no public references to the disease. And states received no assistance from Washington, not even from the Food and Drug Administration."

And just as Wilson had a supportive, complacent press ready to go along with his deceptions, so too does Trump, namely the host of a 9 p.m. nightly show on Fox News Channel. In fact, as Vox recently reported, a team of researchers concluded that viewers of Sean Hannity in the early weeks and months of the pandemic were more likely to be ignoring safe-distancing rules and to be putting themselves at heightened risk to coronavirus. The paper — from economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott — focused on Fox news programming in February and early March and compared the programming of Hannity to that of his 8 p.m. counterpart, Tucker Carlson, who was more directly sounding the alarm to his viewers. Using both a poll of Fox News viewers over age 55 and publicly available data on television-watching patterns, they concluded that "greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.” (Too bad they didn't include Laura Ingraham in that study!)

It’s been a wild ride watching the president’s propaganda arm message coronavirus, a magical mystery journey of obfuscation and dysfunction and anti-science rhetoric, if you will. Our journey started with Fox News messaging the pandemic as just the flu, or perhaps, as the now-departed Trish Regan said, “Yet another attempt to impeach the president.” And Hannity and In­graham accused the news media of whipping up “mass hysteria” and being “panic pushers.” Yes, the network that was breathless and hysterical about Benghazi (four American deaths) and Ebola (two American deaths), accused the mainstream media of the “politicizing and weaponizing of the coronavirus.” Because irony is completely utterly and totally dead.

But as people in this country actually started to die—first by the hundreds and then by the thousands—and possible legal troubles began to mount for Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, Fox News knew it had to tack, but still stay true to their mango God-king worship. Fox switched course. The “intellectual” of the nightly crew, the slack-jawed ghoul Tucker Carlson, declared that coronavirus was real and not a hoax, intoning, “People you trust — people you probably voted for — have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.” This was on March 10th, when there were already 712 confirmed cases and 27 deaths.

But when it became harder and harder to message the president’s tragic mishandling of the pandemic, one that has now killed 50,000 Americans, and is on track to surpass the number of causalities from the Vietnam War, Trump seemingly found a cure for the virus, a somewhat dangerous malaria drug that he deemed a “game changer.” No one loves a miracle cure better than a carnival barker president and his propaganda arm.

And, at first, that media arm was all in. Carlson was enraged when CNN’s talking heads expressed skepticism, saying, “Watching people in the media talk down a potentially lifesaving medicine because a politician they don’t like has endorsed it is probably the most shameful thing I, as someone who has done this for 20 years, I’ve ever seen. [It] is making a lot of us ashamed to work in the same profession as those people.”

Yes, well, what a difference a few clinical trials make. A study in China showed that patients that got “the drug did not fare significantly better than those who did not receive it.” a study of US veterans' hospitals shows no benefit and perhaps higher death rates compared to those who didn’t take the drug. The miracle cure was no miracle, and eventually Fox got the message and stopped messaging hydroxychloroquine. As The New York Times pointed out in an article on April 20th, “In fact, since April 13, hydroxychloroquine has been mentioned about a dozen times on Fox News, compared with more than 100 times in the four previous weeks, according to a review of network transcripts.”

And then, on Thursday, April 23rd, the president had a truly disastrous press conference where he suggested that, “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.” The president has said a lot of really insane stuff, but never has he said something that prompted a fact check from one of the biggest sycophants in Trumpworld, Fox and Friends’ Steve Doocy. The next morning, Doocy, looking particularly agitated, reminded his audience that ingesting cleaning products “is poisonous.” It was an enormous moment in Trumpworld. In the Times, Michael Grynbaum described it as, “a rare fissure between the president and 'Fox & Friends,' a show that regularly praises him."

But Doocy was not the only Fox personality who was unimpressed by the notion that Americans would consider the internal use of disinfectant, which can result in serious injury and death. Even the typically loyal Bret Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor, seemed taken aback. “No one at home thinks, ‘Oh, you know what? I’m going to go drink bleach,’” Baier said on the network, adding, after a slight pause, “I don’t think.”

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage and Americans continue to die, Fox News finds itself in an impossible position. Will it be able to continue obfuscating the president’s incompetence? Will it continue messaging for the White House despite the possibility that it could conceivably be its own audience at serious heath risk? Or is there a chance that Rupert Murdoch decides that enough blood has been spilled defending President Trump?

No one knows how this will play out, but if there were ever a time when a conscience could save lives, it’s right now.

Originally Appeared on Vogue