A Fox News Host Said ‘For Some Reason’ Masks Have Become ‘Political’ — How Did That Happen?

In the four months America has been in the grip of an international pandemic, health care officials have encouraged people to wear face masks in order to reduce the disease’s spread. Masks, of course, prevent the spread of droplets carrying the virus from an infected person to others. The messaging on masks has not been entirely consistent, however, and President Donald Trump has refused to wear a mask in public. In the process, some people have started to look at mask-wearing as a kind of symbolic, political act. On Thursday, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy expressed a certain level of curiosity for why that is.

“For some reason, over the last couple of weeks, a month, masks have become political. But the science of masks is not,” Doocy said on the president’s favored morning show.

Later in the show, co-host Brian Kilmeade laid the blame on those pushing “mixed messages” on masks:

When Anthony Fauci was asked about it, he said ‘Do I wear a mask? Well, I don’t go out much.’ Now all of a sudden we are terrible people if we’re slow to get on the mask train. Now you want to wear a mask, okay, but don’t vilify people that are slow to do it because we are getting a lot of mixed messages, and it wasn’t just from the president. It was from our lauded scientists that weren’t on the same page including the surgeon general who told us it didn’t work.

It should be noted, Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged mask-wearing countless times throughout the pandemic. But Fauci did discourage wearing medical masks early on in the outbreak.

In a 60 Minutes interview that aired on March 8, Fauci said “right now in the United States, people should not be walking around wearing masks.”

“It could lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it,” Fauci explained.

By April 3, the CDC had reversed its position on masks, and announced its recommendation that people should wear face coverings in public.

Fauci has explained since then that he advised against the public wearing masks because health care workers were facing PPE shortages at the time, and he wanted to make sure they had enough medical masks.

Kilmeade also brought up Surgeon General Jerome Adams, likely referring to his now infamous tweets from February instructing Americans to “STOP BUYING MASKS!”

The best way to protect yourself and your community is with everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness.
Get your #FluShot– fewer flu patients = more resources for#COVID19

— U.S. Surgeon General (@Surgeon_General) February 29, 2020

Those tweets were heavily criticized as the coronavirus became an escalating national issue in March. It is not clear if Adams offered this public guidance for the same purpose Fauci did, but Adams changed course to encourage mask-wearing — though he has made excuses for why President Donald Trump has not been setting an example for public health guidelines.

Trump himself has been less than clear on the issue of masks.

The president has consistently made a point of not wearing masks in public, said he doesn’t want to give the media “the pleasure” of seeing him in one, and he has made fun of others for wearing them. Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida also memorably mocked his colleagues for wearing masks.

But Trump, and many Republicans, appear to have learned to embrace masks in recent weeks. In two interviews this week Trump spoke positively of mask-wearing. Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio are two prominent Republicans who are now urging mask-wearing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, is now mandating public mask-wearing in most counties in his state.

Politicians aside, the media has arguably played the most influential role in the politicization of mask-wearing.

Back in April, the White House Correspondents’ Association kicked OANN’s Chanel Rion out of the briefing rotation because she refused to comply with socially distanced seating guidelines. Rion continued to appear for briefings thanks to the White House subverting the WHCA to grant her access, and she has refused to wear a mask throughout her reporting for the pro-Trump, pro-conspiracy theory network.

Steve Doocy questioning when mask-wearing got political sparked more than a little skepticism on Twitter, given the role some at his own network have played in turning masks into a culture war topic.

Throughout the pandemic, some of Fox’s opinion hosts have repeatedly attacked Fauci — the country’s top infectious disease expert and White House coronavirus task force member — over his recommendations for curbing the spread of the virus. They have also hosted a series of guests who have sneered at Fauci’s medical advice.

Sean Hannity has remained an outlier here. While his show has hosted guests that dismissed masks, the host himself has repeatedly advocated for social distancing and mask-wearing. Hannity starred in a PSA that aired on the network Thursday night urging Americans to wear a mask.

Tucker Carlson has been more critical. According to a Daily Beast review, Carlson said in March “of course, masks work,” but has railed against states mandating masks in public.

Carlson, who has called Fauci “the chief buffoon of the professional class,” has also used his contradictory comments about masks to question his expertise.

“Dr. Tony Fauci, who is a stone-cold genius who you are not allowed to question, told us that masks do not work, in fact they may harm you. Now he’s telling us they’re completely essential,” Carlson said in May.

After initially urging the use of masks, Ingraham has more recently questioned their usefulness and depicted mandates to wear them as the harbinger for authoritarian rule over the U.S. population.

On March 23, Ingraham posted a Twitter thread urging Americans to wear masks in order to get the economy back up and running.

But by April May, she was comparing masks to climate change, claiming the science was settled on neither issue. Citing Rush Limbaugh, Ingraham accused “the media” of pushing masks in order to induce “panic” and “hysteria.”

In May, Ingraham warned that if Democrats “get real power,” they would enforce public mask-wearing “forever.”

Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, called a proposed mask mandate an act “trampling the constitutional rights of American citizens.”

Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, a fan of Twitter-famous Covid-truther Alex Berenson, even mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask, in a post the president shared with his followers.

Mask-wearing — or going mask-free — also became a political statement as people across America held protests against statewide lockdown measures to enforce social distancing.

During these protests, masks were a frequent a point of contention between anti-lockdown activists, counter-protesters, and reporters covering the unrest. There was one incident in Ohio where a journalist was harassed by a protester in part for wearing a mask, and there was another moment where a man got up close to a reporter in California and told him to “take off your damn mask.”

It’s unclear to what extent the George Floyd protests spread the virus, but many of the cities in which they occurred have not seen notable spikes — perhaps because demonstrators were often seen wearing masks.

Watch above, via Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.