Democracy Has Prevailed.

September 2, 2021

Hey, Wendy Bell! You Might Want To Read This!

From the Washington Post:

Marc Bernier was adamant: He was not going to get a coronavirus vaccination.

“I’m Mr. Anti-Vax,” he told listeners of his talk-radio program in Daytona Beach, Fla., after the federal government provisionally approved the first vaccines in December. He later declared that the government was “acting like Nazis” in urging people to get vaccinated.

But in early August, WNDB, Bernier’s radio home for more than 30 years, announced that the 65-year-old host was being treated in a hospital for covid-19. On Saturday, the station said that Bernier had died.

Bernier was at least the fourth talk-radio host who had espoused anti-vaccine and anti-mask sentiments to succumb to the virus in August. There was also Phil Valentine, 61, a popular host in Tennessee; Jimmy DeYoung, 81, a nationally syndicated Christian preacher also based in Tennessee; and Dick Farrel, 65, who had worked for stations in Miami and Palm Beach, Fla., as well as for the conservative Newsmax TV channel.

All four men had publicly couched their opposition to mainstream public health efforts in the typically hyperbolic and sometimes paranoid rhetoric of conservative talk radio. Farrel, for example, called coronavirus mitigation efforts “a scam-demic” and described the government’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, as “a power-tripping, lying freak.” At one point earlier this year, DeYoung, host of the “Prophecy Today” program, asked a guest whether the vaccine rollout could be “another form of government control of the people.”

Sound familiar, Wendy?

Yes I know technically you're not on the radio anymore (thanks to your Shoot! Done!! solution to people protesting Confederate statues) but this quotation from the article is definitely for you:

“The vaccine isn’t the problem. Talk radio is,” said Jerry Del Colliano, a professor at New York University and publisher and editor of Inside Music Media, which covers the radio industry. Radio companies, he said, “are risking the health of their audiences even as anti-vaxxer bloviators continue to die.”

You are risking the health of your audience by misinforming them about the vaccines, Wendy.

You. You're doing that.