Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch was supposed to celebrate his 89th birthday on March 11 with a lavish party at his California estate. But on March 8, with the COVID-19 coronavirus spreading, "the Murdoch family called off a planned party out of concern for the patriarch's health," Ben Smith reports at The New York Times. Lachlan Murdoch, the 48-year-old son nominally in charge of Fox News, "knew the virus was coming" by January, because "he'd been getting regular updates from the family's political allies and journalists in his father's native Australia," Smith reported.
But "if you were watching some of the commentators on Fox News and Fox Business in the first 10 days of March, you wouldn't have been too worried about the coronavirus," Smith notes: "It would be no worse than the flu, and the real story was the 'coronavirus impeachment scam.'" Two things changed the network's prime-time downplaying of the pandemic — Fox Business host Trish Regan took things too far, and President Trump started warning about the coronavirus publicly on March 11. The Washington Post rounded up some before-and-after commentary:
Smith described a "glaring" gap between how seriously "the elite, globally minded family owners of Fox" took the COVID-19 pandemic and the big shrugs from "many of their nominal stars." But Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott also responded quickly and decisively inside the network's Manhattan headquarters starting in late February, as the apostate Republican Lincoln Project highlighted in its own rebuke of the conservative pro-Trump media's coronavirus coverage.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
On Tuesday, with a sixth Fox News staffer testing positive for COVID-19, Scott noted in an internal memo that "the vast majority of our workforce is now telecommuting" and ordered a halt to all in-studio bookings and contributor appearances. Smith asked Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Public Health Institute, if he believed people will die because of Fox's coverage in those critical two weeks, and he said yes, this "very specific type of misinformation" has been "very harmful." A Fox News spokeswoman accused the Times of "politicizing this serious threat" by "cherry-picking" clips from "our opinion programs."
-
Rupert Murdoch's conservative son wins succession battleSpeed Read Lachlan Murdoch will get control over the media empire that includes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal following his father's death, while his siblings will receive payouts
-
New York court tosses Trump's $500M fraud fineSpeed Read A divided appeals court threw out a hefty penalty against President Trump for fraudulently inflating his wealth
-
Trump said to seek government stake in IntelSpeed Read The president and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan reportedly discussed the proposal at a recent meeting
-
US to take 15% cut of AI chip sales to ChinaSpeed Read Nvidia and AMD will pay the Trump administration 15% of their revenue from selling artificial intelligence chips to China
-
NFL gets ESPN stake in deal with DisneySpeed Read The deal gives the NFL a 10% stake in Disney's ESPN sports empire and gives ESPN ownership of NFL Network
-
Samsung to make Tesla chips in $16.5B dealSpeed Read Tesla has signed a deal to get its next-generation chips from Samsung
-
FCC greenlights $8B Paramount-Skydance mergerSpeed Read The Federal Communications Commission will allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance
-
Tesla reports plummeting profitsSpeed Read The company may soon face more problems with the expiration of federal electric vehicle tax credits
