Listen to Angelo Carusone explain how the undeserved praise from the media for Sean Hannity’s COVID comment caused “a lot of damage”
Carusone: “There was a lot of damage done with all of the accolades to Hannity that night”
Published
Listen to Angelo Carusone explain how the undeserved praise from the media for Sean Hannity’s COVID comment caused “a lot of damage”
Citation
From the August 20, 2021, edition of SiriusXM's The Dean Obeidallah Show
DEAN OBEIDALLAH (HOST): I want to play Sean Hannity from a couple of nights ago, and talking about how vaccines don't work, they don't protect many people.
...
OBEIDALLAH: Well, the science actually shows it will protect you, and that the people who are dying overwhelmingly are not vaccinated
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Yep.
OBEIDALLAH: And ICUs are overwhelmingly, almost exclusively but not, almost exclusively ICUs are not vaccinated. What has gone on at Fox News?
...
CARUSONE: What ended up happening with the Fox thing is they were getting a lot of heat, really intensely for a period of time, so much so that it became modestly unsustainable for the company to just endure, and so they did a little bit of — a little bit of damage control.
Because that Hannity segment that you referenced where he basically said, sort of softly encouraged people to get the vaccine, sandwiched in between bad segments — but the rest of the coverage had a slight improvement. And by improvement, I mean 47% of their segments were discouraging vaccines as opposed to 57, which was the average before that.
OBEIDALLAH: Right.
CARUSONE: And then everybody praised him, right? So, the consensus became that Fox News was being good now. And the problem with that, the way that people got mad at me, some people, because I was being really nasty, but like — I don't care that like, Hannity gets credit. That wasn't my point.
My point was, if you take your feet off the gas before they've actually made a meaningful change, what will end up happening
— because it happens all the time — is Fox will not just go back to the way they were, they'll actually get worse.
That's — every time a Democratic candidate would go on Fox News, they would attack that Democratic candidate two to five times more for the next 48 hours after the appearance, because they have to make it up to their audience, right?
Because they didn't want — they don't want people to think they're getting soft on them. So, it actually always ends up having a backlash effect, and the real fear that I had around the vaccine thing was not that there was a moment for actual change and we were going to take the pressure off, and that they were going to end up getting worse. And that's exactly what happened.
And right after there was about a five day period where their coverage got a little better, and then it got worse than ever. And like, and that's the, and you just — that clip you just played is sort of the culmination where now the new narrative on Fox is that the vaccines are not effective.
And, you know, I think it is a real testament to why consensus, and how the media itself, the conversation, can cut both ways and how quickly the perception can change. There was a lot of damage done with all of the accolades to Hannity that night. It really did change the perception that Fox was good.
OBEIDALLAH: It did.
CARUSONE: And that's — it's terrible.
OBEIDALLAH: And, you know, you know, in a great article in Media Matters, and I really encourage people to read MediaMatters.org, there's great stuff breaking down the media with actual links, you can watch the clips.
So you note that I guess in the recent three weeks, Sean Hannity personally has made 23 separate claims undermining the vaccination effort, including the one we played, and his guests have made another 28 of those statements.
CARUSONE: That's right.