Fox panel attacks MSNBC's Joy Reid for calling out Republicans for being pro-COVID

No one has pushed vaccine hesitancy as much as Fox News

Video file

Citation From the September 17 edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus

HARRIS FAULKNER (FOX NEWS ANCHOR): Liberal media appearing to take sides in the debate over whether or not to get vaccinated. So they're jumping in.

From calling the GOP a cult-loving, or COVID-loving cult to openly shaming those who refuse to get the show.

...

FAULKNER: [MSNBC host Joy Reid] compared COVID for Republicans to precious in Lord of the Rings.

JOE CONCHA (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah.

FAULKNER: What is going on with Joy Reid? 

CONCHA: Joy Reid should not in any capacity have anything resembling a national platform. She shouldn't even be on community access television, Harris. How NBC can --

FAULKNER: Why is this problematic?

CONCHA: Why is it problematic? Because she is saying things that are profoundly untrue, reckless, only seeking to divide, and, look, I get that opinion people will have their opinions, but we are getting into Alex Jones kind of territory, and how they continue to employ this person is journalistic malfeasance. This is the same person, by the way, last year, and there's tape and plenty of it, on multiple occasions, she said said that she didn't trust the vaccine last year. So when you see

FAULKNER: We played it.

CONCHA: Oh, you played it, of course you have. It's The Faulkner Focus. You focus on things, but you look at the stats and only 43% of African-Americans are vaccinated at this point. Compare that to the Asian community where it's nearly 70% or more than 50% of Whites, and Joy Reid with that national platform, she helped push vaccine hesitancy. So don't sit here now and make a completely opposite argument when we could play back the tape here in these situations, but NBC won't do anything. They'll continue to employ her in primetime no less. Fortunately, she's something like 26th overall amongst the three cable news networks in terms of her rankings which is hard to do in primetime. So not a lot of people watching, but at the same time, there she is going viral for all the wrong reasons, and it's everything that's wrong with this business. Joy Reid.

FAULKNER: Yeah, and there's something that I often bring up, and I don't wanna harp on this too much because I understand that people come to their decisions about to be vaccinated or not to be vaccinated from their own lane, but there are a tremendous amount of people of color who have decided that they don't trust the government, and as she sits there and points a finger at the GOP for holding a cultists, you know, I mean -- hugging something as precious as gold and a stone in a creepy movie that wasn't true that had great acting. She's also doing damage to a community that really needs to be spoken to right now that has food and pharmacy deserts. A whole lot of reasons why they don't have doctors in their lives to get good information, why not use her platform for that? Alright, I don't want to make it all about Joy Reid, but I had to get that in there. There is huge hypocrisy where she sits as a black woman to not at least address that part too. 

As others have pointed out, analyses like Concha's here are grossly misleading for failing to account for age differences.

Just yesterday, Philip Bump at The Washington Post further demolished this myth as well, adding as a final point:

Incidentally, the Pew data gets at another important consideration, one also reflected in the Kaiser Family Foundation’s polling from July: Black Americans are also more likely to say they would get vaccinated. New polling from Monmouth University estimates that five times as many Republican as Black respondents say they will never get a vaccination.

Not only does Fox News have a horrible track record on enabling vaccine hesitancy (including at the very beginning of this clip), but Fox News' parent company Fox Corp. itself is taking aggressive pro-vaccine measures.