Right wing US media on COVID, Deep State

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bmforre
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Right wing US media on COVID, Deep State

Post by bmforre » Fri Mar 27, 2020 9:41 am

Trump online base attacks Fauci
WaPo :
A cadre of right-wing news sites pulled from the fringes in recent years through repeated mention by President Trump is now taking aim at Anthony S. Fauci, the ­nation’s top infectious diseases ­expert, who has given interviews in which he has tempered praise for the president with doubts about his pronouncements.

Although both men are seeking to tamp down the appearance of tension — “Great job,” Trump commended the doctor during the White House’s briefing on Tuesday — the president is increasingly chafing against medical consensus. He has found support from a chorus of conservative commentators who have cheered his promise to get the U.S. economy going again as well as his decision to tout possible coronavirus treatments not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“The president was right, and frankly Fauci was wrong,” Lou Dobbs said Monday on his show on the Fox Business Network ...
As Dobbs agrees with Trump obviously Trump is right.

Time to reveal the fakeness of "expertise":
Beyond prime-time television, however, the disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further — aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the “deep state” that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.
As they always have and cherish their own agenda they know from firsthand experience that this is a universal fact.

Representative (?) pair of debate opponents:
Fauci, an immunologist who graduated first in his class from Cornell’s medical school, has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. Between 1983 and 2002, he was the 13th most-cited scientist among the 2.5 million to 3 million authors worldwide and across all disciplines publishing in scientific journals, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.

Peter Barry Chowka, whose Twitter bio boasts that he has been retweeted by the president, recently referred to Fauci, who has advised multiple presidents of both parties, as a “Deep-State ­Hillary Clinton-loving stooge.” Trump has not brought these attacks to his own Twitter feed, but he has surfaced previous pieces by Chowka, including praise for Sean Hannity of Fox News.

And the false caricature of Fauci has been embraced in some of the most avowedly pro-Trump corners of the Internet — places that seem remote from mainstream discourse until they wind up in presidential tweets or in a monologue on Fox.
I fear this may help explain how support for Trump has increased in recent polls. There's not a claim so lame that Trump believers won't embrace it if they see it as support for their true faith.
Last edited by Stephanie on Thu May 14, 2020 9:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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FlammableFlower
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Re: Right wing US media on COVID, Deep State

Post by FlammableFlower » Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:09 am

This really does worry me. The polarisation of views that becomes so extreme as to reject and seek to undermine anything that doesn't conform.

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