How the National Media Covered the 100,000 Coronavirus Death Milestone — And Fox News Buried It

As the nation reached a tragic milestone on Wednesday evening in its battle against the coronavirus pandemic — 100,000 deaths — all the national news organizations marked the grim moment, unthinkable just months ago, as a front-page or A-block news. All of them, that is, except one: Fox News.

Instead, that cable news network’s online and TV programming treated the massive death toll more as an embarrassment or an inconvenient fly in the reopening narrative ointment, something to be noted obliquely, if mentioned at all, or quickly buried under scathing, misdirectional attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the liberal media, China, or Democratic politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Anyone except President Donald Trump, whose name Fox News almost hermetically sealed off from the deadly consequences inflicted upon the country that he leads.

A quick snapshot of the national media’s online coverage during Wednesday’s prime time provided a perfect snapshot of this stark dichotomy. As the 9:00 p.m. hour arrived, major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today as well as broadcast and cable TV networks were leaning heavily into the 100,000-figure across the top of their homepages, surrounding the news with accompanying photos, columns, and memorials mourning the vast numbers of dead. But on Fox News’ homepage, the first screen’s worth of news was devoid of any mention of the 100,000 death toll. Instead, underneath the main headlines, its second section led off with an item about The Five co-host Jesse Watters blasting Fauci as someone who “flip-flops more than a politician.” Below that sat two other Covid-related stories, one warning of the danger of a “lock-down generation” and one with Fauci cautioning about being “overconfident” in reopening the economy.

Only if a curious Fox News fan scrolled all the way down past the top stories would he or she find a small photo of Covid-19 patients and and headline tucked under the “Health” section reading: “US coronavirus death toll crosses 100,000 in harrowing milestone.” Fox News had featured the death toll as the top online story earlier in the day, but dropped it down after roughly an hour.

On cable TV, this same trend continued, as networks CNN and MSNBC led off the top of each hour of Wednesday’s night programming with news and analysis of the 100,000 death toll. These segments were also backstopped with in-depth, how-we-got-here retrospective reports as well as poignant memorials for those who have died from complications associated with the coronavirus.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 provided a clear example of the former, offering viewers a detailed, eight-minute-long chronology of the virus’ impact on the country over the past three-plus months— accompanied by a critical look at Trump’s evolving statements both dismissing the risk and constantly revising upward the final death toll.

MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell situated the death toll amid the political context of the 2020 election and, not surprisingly for that channel, unfavorably contrasted Trump’s pandemic rhetoric with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s. But it at least provided discussion around the fact that the country’s highest-in-the-world death toll was not unavoidable, and that other developed nations have successfully managed to have much lower fatality rates per capita with some having all but stopped the spread of the virus cold.

Such context and introspection was nearly impossible to find on Fox News, however.

On The Five, the death toll’s first mention arrived amidst a rant about Twitter fact-checking Trump by co-host Greg Gutfeld, who slammed the “blood libel” of “certain people on MSNBC saying [Trump] has 100,000 deaths on his hands.” Gutfeld, rather than lingering on the tragic statistic, swiftly pivoted away from it to claim conservatives would suffer more from the media bias.

Later on during The Five, when designated liberal Donna Brazile brought up the 100,000 figure again, co-host Dana Perino took the opportunity to effectively blame China for the pandemic’s singular effect on the United States.

“All of us would have had a lot more information if China hadn’t obscured and tried to prevent the rest of the world from knowing what was happening,” Perino said, in an at-times stumbling soliloquy that carefully employed the first-person plural to avoid mentioning Trump’s name even once.

“If China had — if they had been willing do what was right rather than to try to protect the Chinese Communist Party, we would’ve all had more information and we would’ve had it sooner and we might’ve been able to figure out a way to stop travel sooner, figure out a way to social distance sooner. We might already be reopened and we might not even have had to shut down. There is a lot of things that could have been known if we have the cooperation of China from early on.”

To their credit, Fox News’ pre-prime time news shows at 6 and 7 p.m. did cover the 100,000 milestone head-on, albeit in much briefer versions that their CNN and MSNBC brethren. On Special Report with Bret Baier, for instance, Baier lead off his show with a mention of the death toll and then later wrapped into a news round-up. But in total, Special Report spent less than 30 seconds covering it, not quite blink-and-you’ll-miss-it levels, but close.

Only during The Story with Martha MacCallum, in the 7 p.m. hour, did Fox viewers get a sense of what news consumers on other networks were hearing about the 100,000 death toll. In her final segment of the show, MacCallum offered a worthwhile examination of the milestone and the ongoing threat from the virus, particularly on African-American communities, in a conversation with Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

But this was but a fleeting high point of the night, as Tucker Carlson  kicked off Fox News’ prime time with the neat trick of letting two rival networks obliquely report the 100,000 death total on air for him. In his only coverage of the pandemic’s milestone, he showed brief clips from CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time and a fiery exchange between CNBC contributors Aaron Ross Sorkin and Joe Kernen that both mentioned the nation’s fatality count reaching six figures.

But rather than actually address the grisly death toll himself, Carlson, both times, brushed past the inconvenient news and merely used the clips as handy foils for his ongoing argument that the Democrats and the left-wing media elites are trying to fear-monger the pandemic for political gain.

Cuomo, Carlson claimed, “shamed Americans for daring to step outside without a mask.” But in the clip, the CNN host singled out for criticism massive gatherings of people who were expressing violating CDC guidelines by not wearing masks or social distancing, like a now-infamous Lake-of-the-Ozarks pool party over the Memorial Day weekend that Missouri’s Republican governor later denounced. Cuomo was also shown also said: “Do you want to wear a mask? No. But is it that big of a deal? Not really.” Hardly an attempt at “shaming,” but Carlson’s takeaway, literally seconds later, was nonetheless: “So, you’re immoral if you don’t wear a mask.”

After the CNBC clip, the Fox prime time host, who had belittled Sorkin as “the screechy one,” went on to warn of “a crisis, as profound and dangerous a crisis as any war we’ve ever fought. God help us if we don’t fix it soon.” But lest you be confused, Carlson was not referring to the virus that has already taken 100,000 Americans and, by most official estimates, looks to claim tens of thousands more. Instead, he was blasting the “Chinese-style mass quarantine our leaders mindlessly adopted.”

That non-coverage wound down around 8:50 p.m. on Wednesday and thus concluded the network’s coverage of the topic for nearly two-and-a-half hours, except for the 10 seconds that The Ingraham Angle devoted to the “heartbreaking” death toll early on during the show. Fox News at Night would offer a three-minute, straight news report on it at 11:15 p.m. For his part, Hannity completely ignored the nation crossing the 100,000 death toll. However, Laura Ingraham did find time for a nearly four-minute segment criticizing New York Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic response and the tens of thousands of deaths his state has suffered. “Everybody seems off the hook here and somebody has to be held accountable,” Ingraham declared, with no apparent irony at the end of the segment that did not mention Trump’s name once.

On Thursday morning, as all those homepage headlines from Wednesday night arrived in print form on doorsteps across the country and led off morning shows on broadcast and cable TV, Fox News’ resounding silence about the nation’s Covid-19 death toll continued on Fox & Friends. In total, the show spent mere seconds over the course of three hours acknowledging the massive number of fatalities. And in a fitting denouement to the the network’s painfully awkward avoidance strategy over the previous 12 hours, co-host Brian Kilmeade barely had time to wipe the grin off his face after a jokey segment about Bud Light gifting some of their product to a beer-drinking, Covid-surviving grandma when he abruptly lurched from that “great news” right into sober, one-sentence explanation of the “horrible milestone” of 100,000 deaths. (The next show on Fox, America’s Newsroom, did open with the “terrible milestone” at 9 a.m.)

It was yet another bizarre moment in a daily news cycle where one network stood out for doing its best to tiptoe around the biggest news of the day.

Videos above via CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

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