If Sean Hannity Thinks Coronavirus Panic Is a 'Hoax,' How Many Millions of His Listeners/VIEWERS Do Too?
Jeremy W. Peters and Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times•March 12, 2020
Rush Limbaugh takes the stage during a campaign rally with President Donald Trump at the Show Me Center in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Nov. 5, 2018. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Sean Hannity used his syndicated talk-radio program Wednesday to share a prediction he had found on Twitter about what is really happening with the coronavirus: It’s a “fraud” by the deep state to spread panic in the populace, manipulate the economy and suppress dissent.
“May be true,” Hannity declared to millions of listeners around the country.
As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, denial and disinformation about the risks are proliferating on media outlets popular with conservatives.
“This coronavirus?” Rush Limbaugh asked skeptically during his Wednesday program. “All of this panic is just not warranted.”
The Fox Business anchor Trish Regan told viewers Monday that the worry over coronavirus “is yet another attempt to impeach the president.”
Where doctors and scientists see a public health crisis, President Donald Trump and his media allies see a political coup afoot.
Even on Wednesday night, after Trump gave an unusually somber address to the nation in which he announced he was suspending all travel from Europe for 30 days, Hannity criticized Democrats and vigorously defended the president’s response to the crisis, saying that when he instituted travel restrictions on China more than a month ago, “no president had ever acted that fast.”
Distorted realities and discarded facts are now such a part of everyday life that the way they shape events like impeachment, a mass shooting or a presidential address often goes unmentioned.
But when partisan news meets a pandemic, the information silos where people shelter themselves can become not just deluded but also dangerous, according to those who criticize conservative commentators for shedding any semblance of objectivity when it comes to covering the president.
“This sort of media spin poses a clear and present danger to public health,” said Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative host and author who published a book, “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” in 2018. “If you have people out there who feel all of this is overblown, and feel the need to act out their lack of concern by not taking precautions, it could be exceptionally dangerous.
“That’s not just a problem for the right wing, that becomes a real threat to the general population,” added Sykes, who is also a contributor to MSNBC. “When people start dying, the entertainment value wears off.”
In the case of Fox News viewers and talk radio listeners, who tend to be older than the general population, the danger of playing down the threat is potentially far worse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has specifically identified older people as being at higher risk from serious complications if they contract the virus. Nielsen, the TV ratings agency, lists the average age of a Fox News viewer as 65 years old.
Despite Hannity’s own skeptical commentary, his Tuesday show featured Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a guest. He told Hannity that he wanted to “make sure” viewers knew that the coronavirus “is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu — you got to make sure that people understand that.”
It was not difficult to see why Fauci would think Hannity’s roughly 4 million viewers — the biggest audience in cable news — might not understand. On Tuesday, the star anchor told his viewers, effectively, to relax.
“Sadly, these viruses pop up time to time,” Hannity said, with the certitude of a medical professional. “Pandemics happen, time to time.”
Limbaugh has offered clinical advice of his own. Recently he defended his widely criticized comparison of the coronavirus to the common cold and suggested the timing of the coverage of the outbreak raised “a gigantic series of question marks and red flags.”
And not all the prominent players in conservative opinion are denying the seriousness of the threat. Disagreement on the right has spilled into public view in a way that is unusual, given how swiftly dissent is often punished by Trump and his media loyalists.
“It’s a matter of public health. How can these shills face their followers after all the lies and deceit?” asked Michael Savage, the radio host and author who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in conservative media and urged him to run for president in 2011.
“Are these mouthpieces without any social conscience?” added Savage, who called the words of Limbaugh and others “criminal negligence.”
Speaking on his Monday Fox News show, Tucker Carlson seemed to speak directly to skeptics like the president and Hannity, whose prime-time program follows his. “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” Carlson said, adding: “People you know will get sick, some may die. This is real.”
Trump pays close attention to Carlson’s show, and the two are in regular contact by phone. Earlier this year, the anchor was credited with helping persuade the president to dial back his hawkish approach on Iran — and Carlson’s words on the virus this week were interpreted as a message aimed at the White House.
There are also signs that political views affect how seriously someone takes the public health risk posed by the virus.
A Reuters poll last week found that roughly 4 in 10 Democrats believed the coronavirus was an imminent threat — but only 2 in 10 Republicans felt the same way. And Americans who approve of the way the president is handling his job are far more likely to believe that the government can stop a nationwide epidemic from occurring than those who disapprove, the poll said.
Seventy-nine percent of those who gave Trump high job approval ratings said they were very or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to prevent the outbreak from becoming much worse, compared with only 39% of those who disapprove of him, according to a CNN poll conducted last week.
At times, there has been a jarring split screen between the president’s nonchalance and the sober warnings of the nation’s top health officials, who have been more aggressive about warning certain vulnerable populations not to travel.
Asked Wednesday at the White House what he had to say to those concerned he is not taking the situation seriously enough, Trump offered a tart, terse reply: “Fake news,” the president snapped, before dismissing reporters from the room.
The fallout from the president’s handling of the crisis might have been more easily dismissed as liberal, anti-Trump paranoia if not for an improbable twist of events. A person infected with the coronavirus attended one of the conservative world’s biggest annual gatherings last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, leading some politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to voluntarily quarantine themselves.
Before this person’s status was made public — he was a VIP attendee who purchased a $5,750 “gold” package that granted him access to backstage reception rooms where members of Congress and other high-profile figures mingled — conservatives at the conference were accusing the president’s enemies of inflating the seriousness of the outbreak.
The former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, speaking from the conference stage last Friday, insisted falsely that the media had only just started paying attention to the coronavirus after the impeachment trial ended. And the reason, he added, was “they think this is going to be what brings down the president.”
But over the next few days, CPAC’s organizers were pelted with questions from fellow conservatives, some of whom said they shook the infected guest’s hand, about why they had been left in the dark.
Suddenly the “hoax,” as Hannity and others have called the response to the virus, hit home.
Raheem Kassam, a former Breitbart News editor, was one of several conservative activists who attended CPAC and expressed frustration about how the group handled the incident. Kassam, who said he felt sick over the weekend and on social media chronicled his frustrated attempts to obtain a coronavirus test, knew that he might have been exposed only after someone who works in the office of a member of Congress who was also exposed contacted him.
“I think there’s a grown-up conversation to be had about what happened,” Kassam said in an interview, adding that he did not believe that some conservatives wanted to have that conversation now. “Imagine being that sick, and then finding out why I might be that sick in a thirdhand way. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was scared,” he added.
But the president’s allies have attacked Kassam, accusing him of sowing panic when there are no other known cases to come out of the conference.
Matt Schlapp, president of CPAC, who has sequestered himself at home because he also shook the infected attendee’s hand, appeared on Fox News in recent days to malign the media for exaggerating the threat.
And though he acknowledged in a subsequent interview that he had no medical training, he has made claims about the coronavirus and its apparent lack of contagiousness.
“It’s actually hard to get,” he said on Fox News on Wednesday, speaking via Skype from his home, where he still has a few days left in his self-imposed quarantine.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Fox News guest and pro-Trump leader claims coronavirus is 'actually hard to get' by pointing to himselfDavid Choi,Business Insider•March 11, 2020
President Donald Trump is greeted by Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, as the president arrives to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2020, at National Harbor, in Oxon Hill, Md., Saturday Feb. 29, 2020.More
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
A Fox News guest who visited CPAC downplayed the coronavirus's efficacy by referring to his own symptoms.
Matt Schlapp, the husband of former White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp and the chairman of a pro-Trump group, said he personally "never had a symptom."
"People become near hysterical when they feel like they could get this virus very easily," Schlapp said. "And what the CPAC experience has taught the whole country ... is that it's actually hard to get it."
The World Health Organization on Wednesday classified the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic, after over 110,000 people were infected and 4,200 died, the majority of cases in China.
A Fox News guest who visited the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where an attendee tested positive for the coronavirus, downplayed the virus's efficacy by referring to his own nonexistent symptoms.
Matt Schlapp, the husband of former White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp and the chairman of the pro-Trump American Conservative Union, said he personally "never had a symptom" from the coronavirus, and brushed aside worries after at least one attendee tested positive.
"One thing we've learned is, even when there's an infected person amongst thousands ... it's very, very difficult to contract this virus," Schlapp said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.
"People become near hysterical when they feel like they could get this virus very easily," Schlapp added. "And what the CPAC experience has taught the whole country ... is that it's actually hard to get it."At least five Republican congressional lawmakers have self-quarantined themselves after attending CPAC, which was held between February 26-29 in Maryland. One of the Republicans, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, said he would still undergo a 14-day self-quarantine, despite testing negative for the coronavirus, "under doctor's usual precautionary recommendations."
Sean Hannity used his syndicated talk-radio program Wednesday to share a prediction he had found on Twitter about what is really happening with the coronavirus: It’s a “fraud” by the deep state to spread panic in the populace, manipulate the economy and suppress dissent.
“May be true,” Hannity declared to millions of listeners around the country.
As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, denial and disinformation about the risks are proliferating on media outlets popular with conservatives.
“This coronavirus?” Rush Limbaugh asked skeptically during his Wednesday program. “All of this panic is just not warranted.”
The Fox Business anchor Trish Regan told viewers Monday that the worry over coronavirus “is yet another attempt to impeach the president.”
Where doctors and scientists see a public health crisis, President Donald Trump and his media allies see a political coup afoot.
Even on Wednesday night, after Trump gave an unusually somber address to the nation in which he announced he was suspending all travel from Europe for 30 days, Hannity criticized Democrats and vigorously defended the president’s response to the crisis, saying that when he instituted travel restrictions on China more than a month ago, “no president had ever acted that fast.”
Distorted realities and discarded facts are now such a part of everyday life that the way they shape events like impeachment, a mass shooting or a presidential address often goes unmentioned.
But when partisan news meets a pandemic, the information silos where people shelter themselves can become not just deluded but also dangerous, according to those who criticize conservative commentators for shedding any semblance of objectivity when it comes to covering the president.
“This sort of media spin poses a clear and present danger to public health,” said Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative host and author who published a book, “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” in 2018. “If you have people out there who feel all of this is overblown, and feel the need to act out their lack of concern by not taking precautions, it could be exceptionally dangerous.
“That’s not just a problem for the right wing, that becomes a real threat to the general population,” added Sykes, who is also a contributor to MSNBC. “When people start dying, the entertainment value wears off.”
In the case of Fox News viewers and talk radio listeners, who tend to be older than the general population, the danger of playing down the threat is potentially far worse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has specifically identified older people as being at higher risk from serious complications if they contract the virus. Nielsen, the TV ratings agency, lists the average age of a Fox News viewer as 65 years old.
Despite Hannity’s own skeptical commentary, his Tuesday show featured Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a guest. He told Hannity that he wanted to “make sure” viewers knew that the coronavirus “is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu — you got to make sure that people understand that.”
It was not difficult to see why Fauci would think Hannity’s roughly 4 million viewers — the biggest audience in cable news — might not understand. On Tuesday, the star anchor told his viewers, effectively, to relax.
“Sadly, these viruses pop up time to time,” Hannity said, with the certitude of a medical professional. “Pandemics happen, time to time.”
Limbaugh has offered clinical advice of his own. Recently he defended his widely criticized comparison of the coronavirus to the common cold and suggested the timing of the coverage of the outbreak raised “a gigantic series of question marks and red flags.”
And not all the prominent players in conservative opinion are denying the seriousness of the threat. Disagreement on the right has spilled into public view in a way that is unusual, given how swiftly dissent is often punished by Trump and his media loyalists.
“It’s a matter of public health. How can these shills face their followers after all the lies and deceit?” asked Michael Savage, the radio host and author who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in conservative media and urged him to run for president in 2011.
“Are these mouthpieces without any social conscience?” added Savage, who called the words of Limbaugh and others “criminal negligence.”
Speaking on his Monday Fox News show, Tucker Carlson seemed to speak directly to skeptics like the president and Hannity, whose prime-time program follows his. “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” Carlson said, adding: “People you know will get sick, some may die. This is real.”
Trump pays close attention to Carlson’s show, and the two are in regular contact by phone. Earlier this year, the anchor was credited with helping persuade the president to dial back his hawkish approach on Iran — and Carlson’s words on the virus this week were interpreted as a message aimed at the White House.
There are also signs that political views affect how seriously someone takes the public health risk posed by the virus.
A Reuters poll last week found that roughly 4 in 10 Democrats believed the coronavirus was an imminent threat — but only 2 in 10 Republicans felt the same way. And Americans who approve of the way the president is handling his job are far more likely to believe that the government can stop a nationwide epidemic from occurring than those who disapprove, the poll said.
Seventy-nine percent of those who gave Trump high job approval ratings said they were very or somewhat confident in the government’s ability to prevent the outbreak from becoming much worse, compared with only 39% of those who disapprove of him, according to a CNN poll conducted last week.
At times, there has been a jarring split screen between the president’s nonchalance and the sober warnings of the nation’s top health officials, who have been more aggressive about warning certain vulnerable populations not to travel.
Asked Wednesday at the White House what he had to say to those concerned he is not taking the situation seriously enough, Trump offered a tart, terse reply: “Fake news,” the president snapped, before dismissing reporters from the room.
The fallout from the president’s handling of the crisis might have been more easily dismissed as liberal, anti-Trump paranoia if not for an improbable twist of events. A person infected with the coronavirus attended one of the conservative world’s biggest annual gatherings last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, leading some politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to voluntarily quarantine themselves.
Before this person’s status was made public — he was a VIP attendee who purchased a $5,750 “gold” package that granted him access to backstage reception rooms where members of Congress and other high-profile figures mingled — conservatives at the conference were accusing the president’s enemies of inflating the seriousness of the outbreak.
The former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, speaking from the conference stage last Friday, insisted falsely that the media had only just started paying attention to the coronavirus after the impeachment trial ended. And the reason, he added, was “they think this is going to be what brings down the president.”
But over the next few days, CPAC’s organizers were pelted with questions from fellow conservatives, some of whom said they shook the infected guest’s hand, about why they had been left in the dark.
Suddenly the “hoax,” as Hannity and others have called the response to the virus, hit home.
Raheem Kassam, a former Breitbart News editor, was one of several conservative activists who attended CPAC and expressed frustration about how the group handled the incident. Kassam, who said he felt sick over the weekend and on social media chronicled his frustrated attempts to obtain a coronavirus test, knew that he might have been exposed only after someone who works in the office of a member of Congress who was also exposed contacted him.
“I think there’s a grown-up conversation to be had about what happened,” Kassam said in an interview, adding that he did not believe that some conservatives wanted to have that conversation now. “Imagine being that sick, and then finding out why I might be that sick in a thirdhand way. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was scared,” he added.
But the president’s allies have attacked Kassam, accusing him of sowing panic when there are no other known cases to come out of the conference.
Matt Schlapp, president of CPAC, who has sequestered himself at home because he also shook the infected attendee’s hand, appeared on Fox News in recent days to malign the media for exaggerating the threat.
And though he acknowledged in a subsequent interview that he had no medical training, he has made claims about the coronavirus and its apparent lack of contagiousness.
“It’s actually hard to get,” he said on Fox News on Wednesday, speaking via Skype from his home, where he still has a few days left in his self-imposed quarantine.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Fox News guest and pro-Trump leader claims coronavirus is 'actually hard to get' by pointing to himselfDavid Choi,Business Insider•March 11, 2020
President Donald Trump is greeted by Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, as the president arrives to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2020, at National Harbor, in Oxon Hill, Md., Saturday Feb. 29, 2020.MoreJacquelyn Martin/AP
A Fox News guest who visited CPAC downplayed the coronavirus's efficacy by referring to his own symptoms.
Matt Schlapp, the husband of former White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp and the chairman of a pro-Trump group, said he personally "never had a symptom."
"People become near hysterical when they feel like they could get this virus very easily," Schlapp said. "And what the CPAC experience has taught the whole country ... is that it's actually hard to get it."
The World Health Organization on Wednesday classified the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic, after over 110,000 people were infected and 4,200 died, the majority of cases in China.
A Fox News guest who visited the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where an attendee tested positive for the coronavirus, downplayed the virus's efficacy by referring to his own nonexistent symptoms.
Matt Schlapp, the husband of former White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp and the chairman of the pro-Trump American Conservative Union, said he personally "never had a symptom" from the coronavirus, and brushed aside worries after at least one attendee tested positive.
"One thing we've learned is, even when there's an infected person amongst thousands ... it's very, very difficult to contract this virus," Schlapp said on Fox News on Wednesday morning.
"People become near hysterical when they feel like they could get this virus very easily," Schlapp added. "And what the CPAC experience has taught the whole country ... is that it's actually hard to get it."At least five Republican congressional lawmakers have self-quarantined themselves after attending CPAC, which was held between February 26-29 in Maryland. One of the Republicans, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, said he would still undergo a 14-day self-quarantine, despite testing negative for the coronavirus, "under doctor's usual precautionary recommendations."
President Donald Trump, left, standing with Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, right, talks to reporters about the coronavirus outbreak, March 10, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Associated Press
Schlapp downplayed the warnings raised by scientists on the coronavirus's propensity to spread through human hosts, and contradicted their advice.
"What we can't do is get people thinking that the test is what matters," Schlapp said on Fox News. "What matters is your symptoms. I don't have any. The president doesn't have any."
Although US-based scientists from the Johns Hopkins University reportedly warned that most people who contract the virus show symptoms by the fifth day, they added that the virus can still be transferred through a carrier up to 27 days after their infection.
Schlapp's portrayal of the virus mimicked that of other Fox News opinion hosts in recent weeks. Several of these hosts, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, have portrayed concerns over the virus as one that was overhyped by news organizations.
His comments also come as the White House ordered health officials to secretly classify top-level meetings on the coronavirus, according to four Trump administration officials in a Reuters report.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday classified the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic, after over 110,000 people were infected and 4,200 died, the majority of cases in China. So far, around 30 people in the US have died and over 1,000 people were infected.
President Donald Trump and other senior officials have been criticized after similarly downplaying the coronavirus's spread in the US.
"A lot people will have this and it's very mild," Trump said last week. "They'll get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor."
Read the original article on Business Insider
Schlapp downplayed the warnings raised by scientists on the coronavirus's propensity to spread through human hosts, and contradicted their advice.
"What we can't do is get people thinking that the test is what matters," Schlapp said on Fox News. "What matters is your symptoms. I don't have any. The president doesn't have any."
Although US-based scientists from the Johns Hopkins University reportedly warned that most people who contract the virus show symptoms by the fifth day, they added that the virus can still be transferred through a carrier up to 27 days after their infection.
Schlapp's portrayal of the virus mimicked that of other Fox News opinion hosts in recent weeks. Several of these hosts, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, have portrayed concerns over the virus as one that was overhyped by news organizations.
His comments also come as the White House ordered health officials to secretly classify top-level meetings on the coronavirus, according to four Trump administration officials in a Reuters report.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday classified the COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic, after over 110,000 people were infected and 4,200 died, the majority of cases in China. So far, around 30 people in the US have died and over 1,000 people were infected.
President Donald Trump and other senior officials have been criticized after similarly downplaying the coronavirus's spread in the US.
"A lot people will have this and it's very mild," Trump said last week. "They'll get better very rapidly. They don't even see a doctor. They don't even call a doctor."
Read the original article on Business Insider
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