Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz aren't coronavirus experts. So why are they talking about it on TV news?
Source: Washington Post
Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz aren’t coronavirus experts. So why are they talking about it on TV news?
By Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi
April 18, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Dr. Phil had much to say about the coronavirus lockdown the other night on Fox News.
“Look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes,” the talk-show host said Thursday, “but we don’t shut the country down for that. But yet we’re doing it for this?”
Social media quickly erupted with fury and derision as viewers pointed out the hopeless apples-to-orangeness of his argument: Cars and tobacco aren’t exactly communicable diseases; and both, in fact, have inspired extensive government regulations to limit injuries and death. (The TV shrink was also widely mocked for making a comparison to swimming-pool deaths using a bogus statistic inflated by a factor of nearly 100.)
But the interview raised deeper concerns: Why was Dr. Phil — not a medical doctor but a clinical psychologist with no special knowledge about the politics, science or economics of the shutdown — on a TV news channel talking about the topic in the first place?
Like Drs. Drew and Oz before him, Phil McGraw was on TV, it seems, largely because he’s a articulate, charismatic and well-known TV personality. But none of that amounts to expertise on this particular topic. In fact, in recent TV appearances to discuss the pandemic, fellow celebrity doctors Drew Pinsky and Mehmet Oz have offered commentary based on a loose or seemingly wobbly understanding of the crisis — arguably doing more to undermine public understanding than enhance it.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/dr-phil-and-dr-oz-arent-coronavirus-experts-so-why-are-they-talking-about-it-on-tv-news/2020/04/17/09c2c410-80bb-11ea-a3ee-13e1ae0a3571_story.html
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