I find it hard to listen to either MSNBC or Fox News-- they both seem to feign impartiality (or at least Fox used to) while choosing to promote stories that will predictably whip up the emotions of people on the left or right, respectively. These are usually stories (Critical Race Theory! That thing Trump said! That one lady from Black Lives Matter! The other thing that Trump said!) that really just don't matter. They are only issues because one of those news outlets decided to ask a bevy of "experts" about it, who are uniformly outraged.
Still, though, I sometimes get fascinated with right-wing media-- the more extreme the better. Alex Jones, for example, was just outlandish, but entertaining in the way wacked-out televangelists like Gene Scott were back in the 80's. And when I go there, I always notice that the ads are often for wack-a-doodle medical cures and supplements. It's endless, and formulaic, and consistent.
I guess someone else finally notice. Paul Krugman has a piece in the NY Times that rests on the same observation. Here is part of what he says: We’re seeing a surge in sales of — and poisoning by — ivermectin, which is usually used to deworm livestock but has recently been touted on social media and Fox News as a Covid cure.
OK, I didn’t see that coming. But I should have. As the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, there’s a long association between peddlers of quack medicine and right-wing extremists. They cater to more or less the same audience.
That is, Americans willing to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that Italian satellites were used to switch votes to Joe Biden are also the kind of people willing to believe that medical elites are lying to them and that they can solve their health problems by ignoring professional advice and buying patent medicines instead.
# posted by Mark Osler @ 1:00 AM
