Fox News Cherry-Picks COVID Data to Make Blatantly Dishonest Political Points

There has been profoundly positive news lately regarding the Coronavirus pandemic. Nationwide the number of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have declined significantly. We’re not out of the woods yet, and variants still pose a risk, but we’re heading in the right direction. That’s a direct result of the competence and compassion provided by the Biden administration.

Fox News, Covid

Unfortunately, the reporting of this data continues to be distorted beyond any recognition to reality by Fox News and their confederates in right-wing media. On Monday morning Fox News put out a report that was deliberately misleading, in an attempt to boost the profiles of Republican led states Florida and Texas, while disparaging states with Democratic leadership. The headline read “Fully open Texas and Florida reporting fewer COVID cases than Democrat-led Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York.” The opening paragraph elaborated…

“Republican-led states including Texas and Florida are reporting fewer coronavirus cases than Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York — all of which are led by prominent Democrats who refuse to roll back COVID-19 regulations and statewide mask mandates, according to CDC data.”

The operative word in that paragraph is “reporting,” something that Fox News abandoned long ago in favor of making stuff up. It may be true that Texas and Florida reported fewer cases of COVID than New York and the other states mentioned, however, there’s two notable explanations for that. First, their “reporting” has been stifled by brazenly partisan administrators. And second, they have cut back significantly on the testing which would identify the true number of new cases.

A more honest and accurate presentation of the data shows that Texas and Florida are actually underperforming most of the big Democratic run states. California, for instance, currently has the lowest positivity rate in the nation. And it is not inconsequential that, while testing in Texas and Florida is far lower, their positivity rates are much higher:

State Positivity % New Daily Cases Tests per 100,000
Texas 5.2 1,239 220.9
Florida 9.1 4,671 299.1
Pennsylvania 8.4 2,494 356.1
Illinois 3.5 2,047 604.3
New York 2.2 4,064 1,022.5
Massachusetts 1.9 1,214 1,133.1
California 0.9 625 495.4

It’s fair to assume that if Texas and Florida were testing at the same rate as the other states, and reporting honestly, they would have higher incidents of new cases. But they are employing the Donald Trump Blind Math Maxim: If you don’t test, there aren’t any cases.

Any method of reporting that twists reality into something that Fox News can peddle to their cult followers is, in their view, preferable to allowing their audience access to the truth. As a result, Fox News is, perhaps, second only to Donald Trump as most responsible for the avoidable deaths of more than 560,000 Americans. It’s why studies have shown that just watching Fox News actually increases coronavirus fatalities. Fox should be required to run a crawl that states that “Fox News is Hazardous to Your Health.”

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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.

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