In the world of conservative media, author Alex Berenson is a star. Thanks in large part to his relentless Twitter criticism of how mainstream media and Democratic politicians have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, Berenson now regularly appears as an expert on Fox News and One America News Network shows. No, he’s not a scientist or a doctor (he has degrees in economics and history from Yale); he’s something even more valuable to right-wing media outlets. Berenson is a former New York Times reporter who is willing to lean hard on his résumé for credibility -- while advancing the types of arguments these conservative outlets had been making already.
To understand the specific role Berenson plays in the right-wing media ecosystem, one only has to look as far back as the January 2019 release of Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. The book, which made the case against what Berenson has called marijuana’s “unstoppable march to legalization in the United States,” was widely criticized by researchers, doctors, and scientists. In a Times op-ed about the book, Berenson pointed to a 2017 report from the National Academy of Medicine concluding that marijuana use is “likely to increase the risk of schizophrenia and other psychoses.” This, he argued, represented a “change in the scientific consensus” that was being ignored. As it turned out, this wasn’t quite true.
Ziva Cooper, a pharmacologist on the NAM Committee on the Health Effects of Marijuana at the time of the report’s publishing, replied to Berenson’s Times op-ed in a Twitter thread. “We found 1) an #association between cannabis use and schizophrenia and 2) an #association between cannabis use and IMPROVED cognitive outcomes in individuals with psychotic disorders (not mentioned in the editorial),” she wrote. “Since the report, we now know that genetic risk for schizophrenia predicts cannabis use, shedding some light on the potential direction of the association between cannabis use and schizophrenia,” she added.
To be fair, Berenson isn’t completely out of his depth. For more than 10 years, he worked as a reporter at The New York Times, and he spent a portion of that time covering the pharmaceutical industry. Even so, a lot of experts were loudly telling him that he had misrepresented and perhaps misunderstood research on his book’s topic. Undeterred, Berenson responded by positioning himself as someone facing unfair backlash from the mainstream simply for speaking an inconvenient and unpopular truth.
Berenson has become a darling of conservative media thanks to his contrarian takes and credentials as a former New York Times reporter.
Despite heapings of criticism from experts, Berenson won praise for Tell Your Children in right-wing media. The Washington Times, The New York Post, and The American Conservative all wrote positively about the book. Conservative radio hosts Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved interviewed him on their shows. He spoke at the Hudson Institute, Hillsdale College, the Heritage Foundation, and at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” 2019 policy conference. To watch his speeches and interviews is to understand exactly why he appeals to these audiences. On marijuana legalization, he indulges conservative conspiracy theories about moneyed interests working to implement policy contrary to scientific consensus, sometimes embracing narratives about “elite media” and the right’s favorite boogeyman, George Soros.
“It’s a lot of the elite media that’s bought into this,” he said, referencing legalization during a January 2019 appearance on Fox & Friends. “The number one group that’s encouraged legalization over the last 20 years is the Drug Policy Alliance, which is a well-funded group -- actually, George Soros is its largest backer.”
Now more than a year after releasing Tell Your Children, Berenson is again being warmly embraced by right-wing media -- this time for his “contrarian” views on the COVID-19 pandemic. Berenson’s been a major critic of lockdown efforts, arguing that the overall threat posed by the novel coronavirus has been overblown.
“Ex-NYT reporter Alex Berenson calls on governors to reopen schools, questions coronavirus lockdowns,” reads a Fox News headline from April.
Ex-NY Times reporter blasts governors over 'infuriating' lockdowns: 'They are fools and haven't read the data,’” says another.
“Ex-NYT reporter Berenson says officials using testing concerns as 'excuse' to delay lifting lockdowns,” goes a third.
An April article at Vice mockingly referred to Berenson as “the world’s foremost former New York Times reporter” for how frequently the credential is touted by those referencing him approvingly. But it doesn’t actually say much about his level of COVID-19 expertise.
Right-wing media embrace credentialism that -- accurate or not -- gives their audience the impression of a defection from liberal groupthink.
Berenson joins the ranks of Lara Logan and Sharyl Attkisson as journalists who’ve found a friendly home in right-wing media after previously working for mainstream outlets. Both Logan and Attkisson worked at CBS before migrating to more explicitly conservative media outlets: Logan has her own show on Fox Nation called Lara Logan Has No Agenda, and Attkisson hosts Sinclair’s Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. Prior to landing on Fox Nation, Logan appeared across various Fox News shows to decry the media’s supposed liberal bias. Attkisson has done the same, and she famously created a “media bias chart” that conservative outlet PJ Media used as the basis for a misleading clickbait article, which eventually led Trump to rage-tweet a threat to regulate Google.
Credentialed journalists like Logan and Attkisson are particularly useful to conservative media outlets in that they present themselves as mainstream media turncoats willing to risk their careers in the name of truth -- at least the right-wing version of truth. They present their stories as similar to those of principled whistleblowers -- insiders who’ve seen how the proverbial sausage is made but couldn’t stomach it. It’s a form of martyrdom, but it comes with a built-in right-wing fan base. Berenson recently and perhaps inadvertently touched on this in a Twitter thread later posted as an opinion piece to FoxNews.com: