Has Jen Psaki Finally Had Enough of Fox News Hack Peter Doocy’s Gotcha Questions?

President Biden’s initiative to increase the rate of vaccinations in America is being received by the majority of people in the country with significant support and optimism. A recent poll asking whether voters in five swing states would favor corporations requiring employees to get vaccinated or get tested weekly found that upwards of 60% were in favor of it.

Jen Psaki, Fox News, Peter Doocy

That broad-based support, however, has not deterred Fox News and Republican partisans from launching exceedingly hostile attacks on both Biden and his plan. Here’s a taste of the rancid rhetoric that Fox is regurgitating:

That last friendly fellow who was insinuating that government employees be murdered was Josh Mandel, the current Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio.

Meanwhile, at Friday’s White House press briefing, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy assumed his role as Chief of Inane Inquisitions. Seeking to trip up Press Secretary Jen Psaki (for which he has a perfect record of failure), Doocy entered into the following exchange:

Doocy: Why is it that you’re trying to require anybody with a job or anybody who goes to school to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but you are not requiring that of migrants that continue walking across southern border into the country?
Psaki: Look, our objective is to get as many people vaccinated across the country as humanly possible. And so the President’s announcement yesterday was an effort to empower businesses, to give businesses the tolls to protect their workforces. That’s exactly what we did. But certainly we want everybody to get vaccinated, and the more people to get vaccinated, whether they are migrants or whether they are workers, protects more people in the United States.
Doocy: But it’s a requirement for people at a business with more than a hundred people, but it’s not a requirement for migrants at the Southern border. Why?
Psaki: That’s correct.

Psaki’s final response was less a reply to Doocy’s question than it was a dismissal of his foolishness as a waste of time. There are stark and obvious differences between the government’s role in making the workplaces of 100 million people safer, and the role of immigration agencies managing a few thousand temporary detainees. Biden’s focus on the former is clearly a higher priority.

That said, the welfare of the detainees has not been disregarded. All of the immigrants coming across the Southern border are tested for the coronavirus and offered a vaccination. And just like American workers, they are not forced to take it. Even so, 70% of the immigrants agree to be vaccinated. That’s a significantly higher percentage of vaccine acceptance than for Fox News viewers, which is only about 62%. That compares to 83% for viewers of CNN or MSNBC. The numbers are even worse for Trump voters (50%) versus Biden voters (91%).

Doocy’s question harbors a couple of typical Fox News hypocrisies. First of all, it’s premise is that it’s wrong to mandate vaccines. But it then it suggests that, despite being wrong, such mandates should be applied to even more people, in this case immigrants. Secondly, if Fox News were aware that vaccines actually are being offered to immigrants, the network’s xenophobes would be outraged that those resources were going to foreigners rather than American citizens. America First, and all that.

So once again Doocy has demonstrated his ignorance of the issues he raises. Either that or he is so determined to manufacture controversy that he doesn’t care how ignorant he appears. And once again Psaki has spanked him for his pathetic insolence. You would think he would get tired of this after so long. Apparently Psaki is.

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How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

CNN’s Jake Tapper Goes Off on Biden for ‘Scolding’ Willfully Deceived Vaccine Refusers

For the majority of Americans who have done the sensible and responsible thing by getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, their obstinate counterparts who reject the vaccine (and science) are a mortal threat. They are putting both the health of people and the nation’s economic health at risk. And the President, as well as the American people, aren’t having it.

Joe Biden, Tweet

On Thursday President Biden addressed this threat with both blunt language and substantive policy. His plan to increase the rate of vaccinations by, among other things, directing large companies to require that their employees either get vaccinated or have weekly tests would provide greater protection for the population at large. Predictably, this was met with scorn by right-wing politicians and pundits. Especially Fox News (who Biden called out in his speech) where they maligned Biden as a “tyrant” who “declared war on millions of Americans.”

Unfortunately, over at CNN there was additional criticism of the President from a rather bizarre angle. Jake Tapper hosted a segment (video below) wherein he complained that Biden was taking the wrong approach by “scolding” the unvaccinated. He characterized them as victims of the liars in government and the press. While it is true that Republicans, Fox News, and their confederates have been flagrantly lying to the American people, it is naïve to portray them as victims. They have the same access to the truth about the COVID pandemic as everyone else. They just willfully choose to believe what are easily provable lies. Nevertheless, Tapper had this to say about it:

“I don’t think scolding is the approach. There are these purveyors of misinformation out there, and they’re not just on the right. Robert Kennedy Jr. is one of the most notorious ones. And I haven’t seen the president or anyone say, look, people, like, he’s scolding the people that are being lied to as opposed to the liars.

“Instead of saying there are a bunch of people trying to get your money, trying to get you attention, trying to get your votes, trying to get your views and clicks, they are lying to you. Instead of shaming the liars and trying to educate the people being lied to, he’s scolding the people being lied to. And again, as with the election lie, you can get mad at the people who believe the lies, but the villains are the liars.”

Tapper is correct that there are “villains” who are lying to people and that they deserve to be castigated for their reckless and potentially deadly dishonesty. But that’s the only part he got right.

It was wrong to describe Biden’s tone as “scolding,” when it was, in fact, appropriately caring as he implored the resisters to do the right thing for themselves and everyone else. It was also wrong to pretend that there was some equivalence between the long-running, fringe, anti-vaccine campaign by RFK, Jr, and the establishment Republicans and conservative media who are exacerbating the problem.

Tapper also claims not to have seen anyone criticizing or “shaming the liars” who have misled the resisters. Really? There has been significant amounts of such criticism whenever someone at Fox News, or some self-serving Republican hack, has expressed their hostility to vaccines and the need to get more people to partake of them. Biden even addressed it in his speech on Thursday saying that, “to make matters worse, there are elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19.”

However, as guilty as the vaccine disinformers are of putting the nation at risk, the people who choose to believe them are not mere victims. They purposefully ignore and/or rebuke the truth about vaccines. They are hardened in their opposition to the facts, instead preferring to believe Facebook quacks, Fox News hacks, and political whacks.

Credible doctors, politicians and pundits have been trying for months to get the resisters on board. They’ve tried every type of persuasion imaginable, including education, appeals to compassion, profiles of resisters who died, and even cash rewards. If they haven’t been convinced by now, exactly what does Tapper think will finally convince them? Furthermore, isn’t Tapper’s position condescending to the resisters, implying that they are too stupid figure out that they are being lied to? While that may be true, how will it help his argument to succeed?

So yes, Tapper is correct about the guilt of those disseminating lies. But he is too easy on those consuming them. There is nothing remotely credible about Tucker Carlson’s paranoid ranting that vaccines don’t work and “they” won’t tell you. Nor are Sean Hannity’s efforts to plant doubts about the vaccine rooted in facts. But it is consistent with the rest of the rightist media that deliberately steers people away from life-saving guidance by medical experts. And the unvaccinated are not being forced to believe it. They a choosing to do so, freely.

Tapper might want to listen to Biden’s speech again and pay close attention to his appeal. Particularly this part that displays his empathy for all of the people of the country, and his genuine desire for everyone to be safe from the ravages of the pandemic:

“My message to unvaccinated Americans is this: What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We’ve made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine is FDA approved. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We’ve been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing.”

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.