Fox Nation host Lara Logan has been absent from Fox News this past week, following her comparison of Dr. Anthony Fauci to an infamous Nazi war criminal.
Since October 1, Logan has made at least 12 appearances on Fox News' weekday programming, according to Media Matters' internal guest database. But since her notorious appearance last week, Logan has yet to appear.
If indeed Fox has sidelined Logan following the public outrage over her outlandish comparison, it would also fit a longstanding pattern for Fox commentators. Over the years, many of them have taken suspiciously timed vacations or otherwise been absent right around the time that they’ve become engulfed in scandals or made outrageous remarks. In most cases, the Fox personality in question returns to the air after some of the controversy has blown over, and gets right back to spreading misinformation.
On last Monday’s edition of Fox News Primetime, Logan claimed that “this is what people say to me, that [Fauci] doesn't represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele, Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps.” (Exactly who these people are that say such things, Logan did not explain.)
In the days following Logan’s remarks, she tweeted further attacks at both the Auschwitz Museum for having condemned her remarks, and at Fauci for his past research on AIDS drugs. On her Twitter account, she promoted even more false claims, saying that AIDS is not linked to HIV at all and that research on HIV/AIDS drugs is an elaborate conspiracy to make money and cause additional suffering.
Fauci appeared Thursday night on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, responding that Logan’s remarks were “unconscionable” and an “insult to all of the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in the concentration camps,” in addition to calling out inaccuracies in Logan’s other statements about COVID-19. He further took issue with Fox News as a network, saying, “How they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action, I’m astounded by that.”
To be clear, Fox has essentially been silent on the Logan problem. When Fauci appeared Friday with Fox Business host Neil Cavuto, their friendly interview never addressed the attacks that Logan and other network personalities had made against the country’s most prominent medical expert on COVID-19. Fox’s Sunday media criticism show MediaBuzz also never mentioned Logan, either.
Furthermore, Logan’s remarks about Fauci were hardly unique for the network. That same night, Fox’s top prime-time host Tucker Carlson compared Fauci to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Carlson further alleged that the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements were a “campaign to demonize a group of powerless Americans — to transform them into kulaks, objects of state-sponsored hate in their own country.” The term “kulak” referred historically to peasant landowners in Russia, who were violently persecuted by Joseph Stalin — with Carlson thus invoking two opposing totalitarian regimes from history in a single monologue.
