I recently found myself wondering what readers of Fox News are seeing about COVID-19, since I never see the kind of info there that I see on the NYT and WaPo (e.g. trends, numbers of infections). Thought I'd check out their website.

Come with me on a wild ride:

Today's front page on @FoxNews has a ton of articles about the election, Hunter Biden, and about Big Tech (with a connection to Hunter Biden). If you scroll way down, you find two articles related to coronavirus. Both are there to scare you about things unrelated to health.

At the top of the main page, however, there is a link to "hot topics", one of which is Coronavirus. Let's go check it out!

The linked page has some data on the right panel, and this "what you need to know" article, which takes up the bulk of the page.

The careful reader will observe that this is actual "What you needed to know" in August.

Before I go on, let me be fair--below this link are a host of recent articles about COVID. But you have to scroll down, and the font is small. It would be interesting to hear data on how many people scroll down to the lower-level stories on any news site.

That "what you need to know" thing seems pretty important, though, so let's go there and see what we need to know.

Top article is a video about two entrepreneurial moms who have created a "better" mask for their kids--American-made face shields, which they say provide "a higher level of coverage...than face masks".

Problem: the CDC disagrees.

Let's scroll past the video--here we find a ton of links to questions a person might have about COVID. Again, sounds super useful, yes?

Well, let's follow some of the links. The first one asks "what are the symptoms?". What we get is an article from March 3.

We've learned a lot since March 3.

The article even says "by March 3 the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. had reached 100".

Later in the list of things we "need to know", there's a question about caring for a person with COVID. Sounds important, yes? Let's see what @FoxNews recommends for us!

Yep, you read that right: "that those who are healthy and do not have a compromised immune system can continue to safely care for these patients."

Here's another good one--think you might need to get tested? Want to know what Fox says about that?

One more thing--want data about how the virus is spreading in the US? Looking for plots like these?

Well, Fox gives you a number for total cases or deaths in the whole country, plus this map. While this provides some important info, it is not scaled by population and is thus misleading.

Look, I get it. I know that this page is old and our understanding of this virus has changed. But this is the top article on @FoxNews's top page about the virus and it is chock full of INCORRECT INFORMATION.

Again, there is *some* info that is helpful if you scroll past the months-old-inaccuracies in their main article. But I would argue that a news agency should make the news visible and accessible, not to bury it.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe that the media has an obligation to actual inform people, not mislead them. This is first rate bullshit, my friends.

(and apologies--I accidentally hit "post" well before finishing and I have no idea if this thread is going to be structured properly. ARGH.)

In summary, reading @FoxNews tells you nothing useful about coronavirus. It is woefully out of date, misleading, and buried beneath the rest of what Fox calls news. The magnitude of the crisis is utterly absent.