Introduction

The event we have chosen is not something that happened in a day or a month. The rise of Anthony Fauci has been a continuous process, which began when Coronavirus entered the United States of America. He had been a scientist, physician, administrator and spokesman for decades. Long before the coronavirus even existed, Fauci had done a lot of work for the medical field as well as for the country. He had won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008, before the revolutionised media of the twenty-first century catapulted him into the public eyes after his public-facing role in managing the COVID outbreak in America.

Today, Fauci is not just a household name in America, but in the whole wide world. And, if today there was a position for the First Doctor alongside the First Lady and First Family, it would definitely be Dr. Fauci.

Never, in his decades long career, has he been more praised, never has he been more lashed out at. Yet, the positive opinions surrounding him have taken over the negative.

In our series, we showcase the rise of Dr. Anthony Fauci. The media artefacts are chosen to showcase the most interesting turn of events in the rise of Dr. Fauci, and they have been analyzed critically through the lens of Media Literacy concepts. We have started off with the history of Dr. Fauci in the medical field, then moved on to the political image that had surrounded him, and then moved on to how his influence increased in the social spheres of America, assisted by the meme culture and Hollywood. The ultimate testament to his popularity was the coining of the term “Fauci effect.”

1. The Medical : Life of Fauci before Coronavirus

“Dr. Anthony Fauci, Explained” by Vox has set a picture in our and our reader’s minds of how Dr. Fauci came to prominence, though that prominence was nothing compared to the prominence he boasts today. However, his fight against the AIDS crisis was the bedrock on which his career grew. Few doctors get to serve six American presidents, even fewer get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But then, how many doctors rose to the occasion when the AIDS crisis affected the world? Very few. 

The question is, if Dr. Fauci was a one in a million public health hero in the 80s, why did we not see a comparable meteoric rise in his prominence back then? In all truthfulness, AIDS was a disease the world was not ready for (much like COVID). But the distinguishing feature was that to fight AIDS, Fauci did not have the assistance and acceptance from the medical community as he did for COVID. 

Henry Jenkins, in his book on Convergence Culture, talked about a few important concepts: media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. And perhaps, these concepts might have some insights for us as to why Fauci gained the massive popularity for handling COVID that is incomparable to the little recognition he got for negotiating an arguably harder challenge of AIDS.

The convergence culture in media is only spurred by the active participation of people, the sort of participation that was missing in the last century. Sure there were protests by the common public and support by the activists, as Vox shows us, but the public participation was nowhere as massive as we saw in 2020. In a matter of two months, Fauci became a household name. Sure there are other reasons, COVID affected more people than AIDS, but the role of participatory culture cannot be diminished. The passive media participation in the 80s ( reacting to Academic journal and newspaper publications) has moved to active participatory culture (White House press briefings by journalists, interviews with media houses and celebrities, engagement with common people through emails, etc).  We discuss this more with the support of our artefacts four and five.

Jenkins said “None of us can know everything, but each of us can know something” while talking about collective intelligence. We see this to be true in context of the rising opinions on Dr. Fauci, and how collectively shared intelligence about who Dr. Fauci is and what he says among the consumers of media in this world of convergence played a role in the public’s perception about him. 

2. The Political: A relationship timeline of the two faces of America

As we accepted earlier, there are reasons other than the Convergence Culture that can be attributed to the rise of Dr. Fauci. We now focus on one of those other reasons: the political view focusing on President Trump and Dr. Fauci. Even though Dr. Fauci has said multiple times that he is apolitical and tries his best to not take a stand on any political or ideological issue, the narrative of conversation between the two somehow became a Republican vs Democrat issue. Trump had been the face of America for a while now, but his relationship with Dr. Fauci made the Doctor the other face of America. Two sides of a coin, two opposing faces of the same country, we often saw them trying to reconcile their differences but the burgeoning distance between their opinions was not to be reconciled. 

USA Today has created for our readers an exhaustive summary of the Trump-Fauci interactions, from January to October 2020. The artefact makes our task easier to track the relationship between the two public personalities. At all points in the timeline, we see a divisiveness in the approach as well as opinions of the two. Some would think that such a difference of opinions between two people leading the nation through a pandemic would create worry among the masses. But instead, this rift ended up dividing people into two groups. These groups were more or less the same as that of the Democrat Republican divide.

Warner’s discussion on Publics and various kinds of publics becomes extremely relevant here. The public here can be organized on the basis of nationality, a totality based on being American. A public here would be our concrete audience that shares the ideological/opinionated space of Dr. Fauci. Now we take this group to be the dominant public, and hence a counter-public is formed due to its conflicting relationship with the supporters of Dr. Fauci. However, here our counterpublic is not so small, as the Pro-Trump rally encompasses a wide space. An idea that can be used to define our counterpublic is Tony Schwartz's “partipulation.” Jhally mentions that partipulation is essentially the society participating in manipulating itself, by being a part of a narrative that is being used to manipulate them. However, the counterpublics could very well use the same term to describe our dominant public too.

While the White House press tries to sell a prescriptive claim (Example : Fauci and Trump have always had a very good working relationship), Fauci presents descriptive claims throughout (he hasn’t briefed Trump personally in two months and COVID could have been approached better if there wasn’t such divisiveness). 

However, while looking at the article, we must not forget that USA Today is an example of elite media, as discussed by Noam Chomsky. And in this institutional structure, the product for elite media is its consumers, which makes us and our readers the product that the media house sells to its advertisers and promoters, by manufacturing consent or employing political warfare. 

3. The Social Joins the Political

As Dr. Anthony Fauci rose to fame, so did the plethora of merchandise that was made in his name. Opportunists quickly realized the marketability that this pandemic and his public persona had bestowed on to Dr. Fauci's face. You see the socks and the doughnuts, as soon as you open the artefact. Welcome to America, the land of impressive consumerism. 

Due to the Trump administration's widely perceived mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis, the American public looked towards Dr. Fauci for words of advise and wisdom, and he delivered well on that expectation. This is why he became an image that most Americans would want to be seen with. Featherstone’s theory on Consumer Culture talks about the consumption logic of production alongside the well-known capital logic. In creating Fauci-faced merchandise, there exists a consumption logic of consumers wanting to associate themselves with Dr. Fauci. 

Sut Jhally talked about how the diamond was marketed to be the symbol of love, in his essay titled “Image Based Culture.” He called it a “fairly dramatic example of how the institutional structure of the consumer society orients the culture (and its attitudes, values, and rituals) more and more toward the world of commodities.” The doughnuts and the socks and the fanart of Dr. Fauci trigger the same bells. Dr. Fauci’s face on the doughnuts are nothing less than dramatic, and since the objective was to sell the doughnuts, there is that inherent commodification of his face and what it represents, that Jhally talked about. America has always been considered to be overflowing with consumerism, and that extending to their food, clothes or mugs isn’t very surprising. What is surprising is that a doctor became a public figure, and majorly because of his advise that typically crossed the American President (probably the least liked of all time).

Jhally also talked about “the need to sell increasing quantities of "nonessential" goods in a  competitive marketplace using the potentialities offered by printing and color photography” and yes, you are not the only one seeing the continued uncanny resemblance with Dr. Fauci’s face printed on the doughnuts (or the socks, or the bottles or the T-shirts or the candles) which definitely come under the category of non-essential goods. 

The cult-like following that Dr. Fauci has attracted is definitely a testament to his rising popularity in the American culture. But, the merchandise is not the only testament we get to his increasing acceptance by the American population.

4. Its 2020 and Nothing is Truly Popular without a Meme to their Name

And we got another testament by the public of Dr. Fauci’s popularity when he became the face of many political memes. 

On 20th March, the US President Donald Trump, at a briefing, made a passing remark to the existence of a ‘Deep State’ within the US Government which conspires against his interests and those of his Republican party. Dr. Fauci, who was standing right behind him, couldn’t help but let out a chuckle and cover his face with his hand. This was not an isolated event, Trump has repeatedly been a perpetrator of misinformation to the world, be it his downplaying of the coronavirus or his suggestion of ingesting disinfectants as a possible treatment for the virus. This particular event, however, set off a switch which catapulted Dr. Fauci to international fame. He was already a notable national figure and was internationally recognized as a leading authority on the coronavirus pandemic. But because of one peculiar reason, the doctor now became a figure who could be recognized by virtually anybody even remotely plugged in to social media. 

This is because this time around, he was covered not just by the newspapers and TV channels but captured by the meme culture on the internet, where a very large consumer base resides. The facepalm by Dr. Fauci, was immediately picked up by people on the internet and memes on it spread like wildfire. The event seemed to define the zeitgeist of time as figures of authority were regularly giving out questionable advice to the public. Facepalming was the only thing that the informed could do. This is also a classic example of cold media where the participants actually had to get involved, open up their browsers and find out the context of the meme in order to relate to it. Soon, Twitter was trending with the hashtag #FauciFacepalm, Instagram meme pages were awash with facepalm memes and Tiktokers flooded the internet with their takes on the issue. This is how Dr. Fauci also conquered the meme world, after the medical, political and consumer world.

The above artefact is one of the many cartoons that the event has inspired. This particular meme shows how the US President is absorbed in his efforts to secure a re-election by whatever means necessary that he is blinded to the fact that the wave of red dots spreading across the map of his nation are not that of his success but actually indicators of coronavirus cases. Dr. Fauci’s face was used on many memes similar to this, to take a laugh at President Trump, an instance of the public putting our protagonist into the political sphere.

The meme culture also signifies an important component of the participatory culture today. Memes have become the one thing that every single person can make and participate in the larger conversation. And making a cartoon/meme on one of the Fauci vs Trump interactions was an active participation by a media consumer, making him a media prosumer.

5. Big Celebrities Get Involved

Ever since Trump came to power, Hollywood has become more active participants in the political media scape, and have offered commentary on Trump and his administration. And, when Trump took on an extremely well-liked, well-educated and accomplished doctor who was advising the entire country on how to stay safe as an opponent, Hollywood felt that they had an ally against the President, much like how our consumers of Fauci doughnuts, socks and candles must have felt. 

Then, Dr. Fauci made a comment which gave Hollywood the perfect entry into the Trump vs. Fauci conversation. In response to CNN reporter Alisyn Camerota’s query on which actor Dr. Fauci would like to portray him, were he to be featured on the popular show Saturday Night Live, he was quite clear that Brad Pitt would be his first choice. And so it was to be, in the second episode of Saturday Night Live at Home, where Brad Pitt donned Dr. Fauci’s hairdo, spectacles, suit & tie and of course, his Brooklyn accent. Pitt offered satirical commentary on President Trump’s handling of the pandemic and thanked Dr. Fauci and the medical community for their efforts.

The involvement of Brad Pitt in the larger conversation about Dr. Anthony Fauci and his work is an extremely apt example of participatory culture, as discussed by Jenkins. Saturday Night Live is a well-loved American show, and has traditionally focused on Hollywood. However, using the platform to capture different aspects of the media landscape (in this case the current political landscape as well as the public health landscape) and drawing from different worlds to present to their consumer base is the essence of the Convergence Culture. 

This video is also a prime example of the results of Media Democratization, of how Hollywood has the ability to come forward to offer views on public health and political matters. And this media democratization extends well into the spheres of common people’s lives, allowing them to create and share their views on a political matter. The new media has helped in the process of media democratization by providing platforms where anybody can exchange their ideas with the rest of the world. However, it is the same democratization that has also resulted in the infodemic we face today.

It is also to be noted that Dr. Fauci is almost always represented as the brains up against the President. Hollywood too, is an elite media and the ideology that they sell to their consumers has always leaned to the left. Thus, it is no surprise that when appreciating a man who has actively chosen to stay apolitical, Hollywood appreciates him by portraying him where his image and work can push forward the agenda that the elite media wants to be propagated.

But at the end of it, we would like to say that Dr. Fauci has the most difficult job in the world if he wishes to stay apolitical.

6. Fauci Effect: Medical School Registrations

While closing our series on the rise of Dr. Anthony Fauci, we must talk about “Fauci effect,” a term coined in his name to show exactly how much influence he has had on the American youth and public. There has been a disproportionate rise in medical school applications, and it has been attributed to Dr. Fauci. While another comparison is given of increased Military applications after the terrorist attack of 9/11, the comparison here is not directly made with the incidence of coronavirus, but rather with the excellent work that has been demonstrated by Dr. Fauci. 

In this podcast from the nytimes.com/daily, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who became the face of information related to the COVID-19 pandemic talks about his experiences along the channels of US government’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic broadcasted in April, 2020. Dr. Fauci propagated the right information amidst the floating false news all over social media in the moment of crisis. He became the face of truth and facts. He had always been mentioning the need for social distancing and using masks that also led people to indulge in conspiracy theories. But he always seemed to stand tall with calmness, and guide the nation. Here, we bring back again the idea of wanting to be closer to Dr. Fauci, that we discussed in context of the doughnuts. And what better way to be closer to Fauci than to walk in his footsteps and become a doctor. Nothing speaks “Fauci is our hero” better than “we’ll become doctors because Fauci was a doctor and he saved the country.” 

Being the leader of the COVID-19 task force, Fauci knows the importance of media in reaching out to the millions, hence uses the opportunities carefully. We have discussed in this series about Fauci being covered by the meme world and the Hollywood. But these were the indirect acts of reaching out to people that resulted from his popularity. Fauci directly worked with many national media outlets, celebrities like Steph Curry, spoke at football games to reach the maximum possible audience. He knew the platform he has, and he has made a complete use of that platform to share his narrative.

Media, too, perpetuated that COVID-19 was a gigantic problem and made Fauci the hero. This podcast is a perfect example of how media is used in order to form a public image of a person. Fauci throughout his journey uses the appropriate platforms at accurate times to uplift his image. Media broadcasted the magnitude of the pandemic and it had a fair share in making Fauci a household name. Medical school applications increased 18% during the pandemic as mentioned by Forbes. Due to Fauci's effectiveness and his expertise in his field, he has acted as a leader in the unprecedented times of a pandemic. This is why many have attributed the increase in the Medical school applications to his work, and it has been called the Fauci effect. 

Using students’ voices in the podcast and featuring their stories in the podcast is an attempt to personalize the statistics. Media helped the contributions of doctors and task force leaders to come to light. However, it is the attribution of the values that a good physician must have to a singular person - to make him the image that corresponds to all the first responders and medical staff that have helped the United States in overcoming the pandemic - that makes this an advertising idea. Nobody can sell all doctors and first responders as well as one can sell a singular face who has all the values of the medical community. 

The question we would like to leave you with is, who is the advertiser behind the rising popularity of Dr. Fauci, who wants Dr. Fauci’s face to be sold, and why do they want that to happen?