Ugh. Where are factcheckers when you need them?
Just now I made the mistake of lighting on Fox News for about a minute, and now my ceiling has bits of my brain and skull all over it following a violent head explosion.
Some Fox blonde with horn-rims was enthusiastically telling a panel about this fascinating bit of history she had just discovered, that an early President, William Henry Harrison, had been inaugurated on a cold day and died as a result. The entire panel oohed an ahhed like she had just announced the discovery of another Rosetta Stone. I read about Harrison’s death when I was ten, so Fox’s assembled idiots treating this rather significant episode in U.S. history like it was obscure trivia was offensive. It was also an indictment of, oh, let’s see…journalism, our education system, and society’s ignorance of history.
Moreover, Harrison, though he was only President for a month before perishing of pneumonia, was a pivotal figure in Presidential history. His was the first modern Presidential campaign (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”) in 1840, and his death set the precedent for all Presidential successions to follow. W.H. Harrison was also the grandfather of a future President, Benjamin Harrison, who was sandwiched between Grover Cleveland’s two terms the way Biden is sandwiched between Trump’s (and while a forgettable, mediocre Chief Executive, Benjamin was considerably more successful than Joe).
That didn’t make my head explode, though. It was when some guy on the panel said, “And Harrison was a Republican too!” followed by the horn-rimmed blonde saying with a laugh, “Yes, but it was much different back then.”
William Henry Harrison was not a Republican! He was the first Whig President. The GOP wasn’t founded until 14 years after Harrison’s death, in 1854: Abe Lincoln was only the second Republican Presidential candidate and the first to be elected.
Fake news, fake history…morons. If our journalists can’t inform the public, the least they could do is not make them more ignorant than it already is.
______________
Aside: The Fox News discussion was, I assume, promoted by the Trump-Deranged social media post like this one, from one of my Facebook friends: “Just wait until they discover that their Dear Leader has left them behind in the cold so he can be snug and warm with his oligarch billionaire buds.”
Ethics Alarms 
1854, but close enough. John C. Fremont was the first presidential candidate.
“The GOP wasn’t founded until 14 years after Harrison’s death, in 1954“
For those keeping score at home, founded in Ripon, WESconsin
PWS
It’s sad what journalists, if you can call them that, have turned into. If Fox News had morals and intelligence, Fox News would research and correct the unintelligent remark for the viewing audience. Whatever Fox News , CNN, MSNBC does to choose the best is obviously choosing substandard intelligence.
Don’t they have editors and script writers and fact checkers and researchers? The “talent” can just go out there and ramble in coherently?
As we saw when The View was being forced to read “legal notes” on the air to correct its constant flow of false representations, if the news outlets care, like if they are afraid of getting sued, they are capable of preventing this stuff. They literally don’t care.
my intro to William Henry Harrison might have come from this song on the Simpson’s:
All: We are the mediocre presidents.
You won’t find our faces on dollars or on cents!
There’s Taylor, there’s Tyler,
There’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes.
There’s William Henry Harrison,
Harrison: I died in thirty days!
All: We… are… the…
Adequate, forgettable,
Occasionally regrettable
Caretaker presidents of the U-S-A!
-Jut
That whole episode was brilliant, though as I mentioned in the worst Presidents series, it unfair to call Harrison, Taylor or Garfield anything but unlucky Presidents, since none of them served long enough to have a chance to shine.
Yes, I recall learning about Harrison’s (shortest) presidency at an early age. I also vividly remember not understanding why, on such a brutally cold day, he decided to go ahead with the longest known speech ever by a presidential inauguration and on top of that not wear an overcoat??
Death by ego. Harrison didn’t wear an overcoat to prove he wasn’t too old but was still strong and vigorous. Then, while freezing, he delivered the longest Inaugural address ever by far, an hour and 40 minutes. He did this to prove he wasn’t the log cabin bumpkin that his campaign had sold him as to contrast with “dandy” Martin Van Buren who had “European tastes.” WH was really American aristocracy, whose father had signed the Declaration.
Attributing Harrison’s death to being out too long in the cold is subject to disagreement. Had he died from exposure or hypothermia that would be a different story. It is an old wives tale that you can catch a cold from being cold.
“Pneumonia is primarily caused by infections from bacteria, viruses, or fungi that enter the lungs. The most common bacterial cause is Streptococcus pneumoniae, while viral causes include influenza and COVID-19.”
Harrison could have easily come in contact with an infectious agent anywhere. It would be more likely that he came in contact with the infectious agent because of a crowd during indoor activities.
The closest article I could find on this subject was Blog – Why breathing cold air can hurt your lungs | Main Line Health which said exposure can reduce your immune system (it does not say how it does this other than dry air reduces moisture in the respiratory system) which could make one more susceptible to infection. But dry air would have been ubiquitous during winter in his day both indoors and out due to the way buildings were heated. Humidification did not exists.
Mayo clinic makes no mention of any pneumonia risk or impaired immune function associated with being exposed to cold for long periods. Cold weather and your lungs – Mayo Clinic Health System
Even accepting the Mainline Health article’s assertion that it reduces immune response it goes on to say that the proximate cause of pneumonia is because of being indoors in close quarters with others.