A decade after screaming about nonexistent “death panels,” Fox News is downplaying the deaths of 200,000 Americans – By Parker Molloy (Media Matters) / Sept 23 2020
A decade after sounding the alarm about nonexistent “death panels” for seniors — and eight years after obsessing over the four lives tragically lost in the Benghazi attacks — Fox News has spent the past six months systematically downplaying, excusing, and shrugging off the now-200,000 Americans killed in the COVID-19 pandemic. The juxtaposition reveals the reality: It’s politics, not American lives, that matters to Fox News.
During the first two years of the Obama administration, conservative media were relentless in their promotion of the “death panel” lie.
In July 2009, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey claimed that a Democratic health care bill being debated in the House of Representatives included a provision that required anyone on Medicare to “have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.”
Soon, right-wing commentators like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity used this phantom provision to claim that Democrats were putting seniors at risk. Hannity said that it was “chilling” that Obama had “so little respect for life” and was trying to “encourage … inconvenient people to consider ‘alternatives to living.’” Ingraham scaremongered about the creation of “death camps” for the elderly should the bill become law. Then-Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. claimed that proponents of the health care reform bill were trying to “save money by killing old people.” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked, “Are seniors going to be in front of the death panel?” “I hope the elderly are watching,” Hannity said during an October 2009 episode of his Fox News show after baselessly declaring that “death panels are back” in a later version of the health care bill.
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