Hannity claims he’s “never called the virus a hoax” 9 days after decrying Democrats’ “new hoax”

Hannity is trying to put his irresponsible coronavirus coverage down the memory hole. Here are receipts.

Sean Hannity’s coronavirus coverage underwent a remarkable transformation in just a week. And it’s not just him — the shift is emblematic of a broader trend at Fox News.

At first, Hannity took an antagonistic approach to coronavirus coverage, even using the word “hoax” as recently as 10 days ago. “This scaring the living hell out of people — I see it, again, as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” Hannity said during his March 9 broadcast, during a segment in which he downplayed the risk of coronavirus to everyone except for people with compromised immune systems and older individuals.

He even cited “coronavirus hysteria” just two days after alleging a “hoax.”

But Hannity is now singing a different tune. While he’s still singing the praises of Trump and trying to shift blame for the coronavirus onto China, Hannity is now urging his viewers to take the coronavirus seriously. Alluding to the social distancing guidelines recommended by the White House’s coronavirus task force and others, Hannity on Tuesday night told his viewers to “take the following crucial precautions over the next couple of weeks. Do it why? Because we love our grandmothers, our grandfathers, our older moms and dads. They are the most vulnerable. They are the most at risk.”

Hannity even commended himself this Wednesday for his responsible coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. “By the way, this program has always taken the coronavirus seriously,” Hannity said. “We’ve never called the virus a hoax.”

The transformation is remarkable:

A similar change has been noticeable across a number of Fox News and Fox Business News shows — from Fox & Friends to The Ingraham Angle to the elimination of Trish Reagan’s show on Fox Business — as the magnitude of the pandemic and its impact on the economy has become undeniable. This shift has also been noticeable in the rhetoric of the president, who reliably watches and live-tweets Fox News programming and enjoys something resembling a symbiotic relationship with the network.

Fox News has been a leader in presenting a Trumpy version of the truth, often portraying news in the best possible light for the president at the expense of science-based facts. But the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed that old paradigm, in part because the reality is that its viewers are perhaps most at risk. Downplaying the pandemic is journalistically irresponsible, and Fox News finally realized that.

The broader shift at Fox News

The most emblematic example of the Fox News pivot is what happened to Trish Regan, a reliably Trump-friendly host who has interviewed the president twice. She went on a rant about the “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam” on March 9 that quickly went viral — one in which she characterized the pandemic as “an attempt to demonize and destroy the president, despite the virus originating halfway around the world.” By Friday of that week, Fox News announced Regan’s Fox Business show was being pulled off the air.

Beyond Hannity and Trish Regan, the Washington Post video team put together this helpful video of before/after clips documenting how a number of Fox News personalities abruptly went from dismissing the coronavirus to taking it seriously within a matter of days last week.

The New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum reported that Fox brass attributed Regan’s forced hiatus to “the demands of the evolving pandemic crisis coverage.” Grynbaum also noted that following Regan’s show on Monday, network executives sent staff a memo urging them to “[p]lease keep in mind that viewers rely on us to stay informed during a crisis of this magnitude.”

“We are providing an important public service to our audience by functioning as a resource for all Americans,” the memo added.

Fox News did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Vox seeking further comment on the shifting tone of the network’s coronavirus coverage.

Fox News viewers took Hannity’s dismissive tone seriously

That the top-rated cable news network in the country is no longer dismissing, downplaying, and politicizing the coronavirus pandemic is a good thing. But polling released this week indicates that Fox News’s earlier tone is having residual effects.

According to a YouGov/Economist poll conducted March 15-17, only 38 percent of Fox News viewers say they’re worried about the virus — a far lesser percentage than those who pay more attention to broadcast news (68 percent) or national newspapers (72 percent). Along similar lines, new Pew Research Center polling shows that Fox News viewers are far more likely to believe the media has “greatly exaggerated the risks” of coronavirus than typical adults or viewers of other TV news networks.

The Pew poll indicates that only 27 percent of Fox viewers consider coronavirus to be “a major threat” to public health in the US. The irony is that about half of the network’s viewers are 50 or older and therefore more at risk of having serious health complications from Covid-19 (the disease caused by coronavirus) in relation to younger people.

Pew also found that 66 percent of Fox viewers are “very confident” in Trump’s handling of coronavirus, which is more than twice as high as the confidence level in Trump among all US adults (24 percent).

The White House, for what it’s worth, seems to appreciate Hannity and company’s efforts. During appearances this week, both Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Vice President Mike Pence praised Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity respectively for their coronavirus coverage.

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