As President Donald Trump repeatedly downplayed the novel coronavirus for weeks, Fox News sang a similar and dangerously misleading tune.
Many the conservative network's most prominent hosts dismissed the threat of the virus, accusing the rest of the media of being "panic pushers" and whipping up mass hysteria. After Trump declared a national emergency over the coronavirus last Friday the tone on Fox News shifted, which The Washington Post documented in a viral video.
The video shows Fox Business hosts such as Trish Regan move from suggesting the coronavirus is "yet another attempt to impeach" Trump to stating that the US must test for the virus to stop the spread and warning of an impending economic recession. That shift occurred within a matter of days, between March 9 and March 13. Amid ongoing backlash to Regan equating the coronavirus with impeachment, on Friday it was announced that she's been removed from her prime-time slot indefinitely.
Among other hosts, the video shows Jeanine Pirro on March 7 saying that "all the talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly doesn't reflect reality." Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top expert on infectious disease, told House lawmakers a few days later that coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, is 10 times as deadly as the flu.
On March 14, Pirro painted the coronavirus in far more stark terms, calling it an "incredibly contagious and dangerous virus."
—andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) March 18, 2020
Much like Trump's statements on COVID-19, Fox News' coverage of the coronavirus was consistently at odds with what public-health experts were saying. And it didn't change until Trump declared a national emergency.
After that declaration, hosts such as Sean Hannity, who on March 10 downplayed COVID-19 and said it was being used as a "political weapon" against Trump, applauded the president and told views "his virus is serious" while urging them to "prepare accordingly."
Trump has gone from repeatedly downplaying the virus, at one point suggesting it's a Democratic "hoax" to hurt him politically, to taking a far more serious tone this week and calling COVID-19 an "invisible enemy."
—QuickTake by Bloomberg (@QuickTake) March 17, 2020
