Certain personalities at one of the President Donald Trump's favorite networks—Fox News—have leapt to repeat the often false talking points asserted by his administration.
One of the network's most devoted Trump sycophants, Tucker Carlson, has been downplaying the threat posed by the virus presumably in an effort to drum up anger at health experts and governors promoting lockdown measures instead of anger at the Trump administration's bungled response to the global pandemic that's killed over 60 thousand Americans.
Carlson continued this effort in his Thursday night show when he began to promote a study which he falsely said was evidence that children under 10 years old couldn't contract or spread the virus—only to be fact checked by his guest immediately after.
Watch below.
Carlson said:
"There is new evidence that young children do not spread the [virus]. Not what we thought."
"Not what we thought" is right. Carlson immediately brought on NYU Langone professor Dr. Mark Siegel who didn't waste time correcting Carlson.
After clarifying that children are less likely to contract the virus and more likely to be asymptomatic if they do, Siegel said:
"They appear to have a protein in the lungs that protects them from severe disease, and almost all the children who get this are either asymptomatic or have mild cases, but it's not true that children don't get it, and it is not true that they can't spread it."
People couldn't help but laugh at Tucker.
But even more people were astounded at the level of misinformation spread by Fox's primetime hosts—and what possible motivation they could have for it.
For a deeper look into the relationship between Fox News and the Republican party, check out Foxocracy, available here.
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