Replies to post #379870 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Former Murdoch exec slams Fox News over vaccine misinformation

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Washington: One of Rupert Murdoch’s former top executives says Fox News has cost lives by turbo-charging hesitancy about COVID-19 vaccines among conservative Americans.

Joseph Azam, a former senior vice president at News Corp in New York, said he saw a “straight line” between the vaccine-sceptical rhetoric of some of Fox’s most prominent hosts and entrenched resistance to vaccines in large swathes of the United States.

“I think Fox has been almost single-handedly responsible for the politicisation of public health in the US and the creation of vaccine hesitancy in a significant portion of the population,” Azam told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/former-fox-news-exec-slams-network-over-vaccine-misinformation-20210717-p58ain.html

Asked why 90-year old Rupert Murdoch, who was vaccinated in the United Kingdom in December, had allowed Fox hosts to promote doubts about the vaccines, Azam said: “I don’t think Rupert gives a damn about Americans. The calculation is a political one and a financial one.”

The states with the lowest vaccination rates all voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election and polls show Republicans are significantly more reluctant to getting vaccinated than Democrats or independents.

Azam said he believed the anti-vaccine messages on Fox were “all about undermining the Biden administration and denying Trump’s successor an opportunity to succeed”.

Azam quit his position at News Corp in late 2017 after publicly clashing with Carlson on Twitter over what he saw as the network’s demonisation of immigrants.

In June 2017 Carlson sent a tweet asking: “Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here?”

Azam, who emigrated to the US from Afghanistan as a young child, replied: “If you come upstairs to where all the executives who run your company sit and find me I can tell you, Tucker.”

News Corp and the Fox Corporation are technically separate entities, but both are chaired by Rupert Murdoch and share the same headquarters in New York.