MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow unleashed a long monologue against conservative media, calling it out for undertaking a broad campaign to misinform viewers and distort the risk of coronavirus while agitating for a quick restart of the U.S. economy.
As her Monday show opened, the staunch liberal Maddow noted that she’d been working in cable news for more than a decade and then traced the evolution of rival cable network, Fox News, and right-wing talk radio from previously legitimate political opponents to its current role as serial propagandists reporting as if from an alternative universe. The Covid-19 outbreak, she explained, has thrown this radical transformation into sharp relief.
“They were people who were coming at the news from a very pronounced right-wing view, perhaps a very partisan, pro-Republican Party view, but at least we were all doing the same kind of work, at least we were all covering the same stuff,” Maddow began. “But over this past decade or so, steadily, that has decreased. Year after year. To the point where now, even in times like this, weird, conservative media is like Earth 2. Like all the rest of us are on Earth 1 in terms of what the news is and what it means to cover it. And in terms of conservative media, they are as influential as they ever were, if not more so, when it comes to electing conservatives in the party base. But the conservative media, the most influential parts of it, really are living in and describing and now promoting a completely different world than the one that all the rest of us live on here on Earth 1.”
“For example, you can see it in how the conservative media has been really, really excited about Sweden,” she pointed out, citing numerous reports on Fox News, in the conservative magazine National Review, and Glenn Beck’s right-wing radio show. “They are still hyping Sweden and how Sweden’s response has been the best in the world and that should be the one that America emulates.”
Why? Because, as Maddow notes: “Sweden didn’t do a stay-at-home approach. They didn’t close themselves down. Which sounds awesome, right? The Swedes have found the coolest possible way to deal with coronavirus. What they have decided to do is not do anything, and it must be working great.”
In fact, as she notes moments later, Sweden’s approach has now backfired horribly and the number of Covid-19 cases in that country have skyrocketed in the past two weeks, surpassing all other Scandinavian countries. Sweden’s death toll per capita is now even greater than that of the U.S.
“It turns out the virus doesn’t care how cool that sounds,” Maddown noted. “Our friends in conservative media are nevertheless in love with the idea that this is no big deal, that you can definitely reopen everything as soon as you don’t feel like dealing with all of this stuff anymore. And so with the helter skelter encouragement of President Trump, we’ve now got red state governors all over our country, saying: ‘You know what? Screw it, let’s tear the lid off. The Swedes did it. It was great!’ I keep hearing in conservative media how everyone has been overreacting and do we really need to do anything, so that’s the way we should be governing here.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
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