‘He is destroying his legacy’
Texts sent during the Jan. 6 riot reveal Fox anchors’ true feelings about the Capitol attack.
Unlike many of us who watched helplessly in abject horror on Jan. 6 as a seething crowd of Donald Trump’s true believers stormed the U.S. Capitol building, Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham actually had the means to communicate her concern to the president’s top aide.
“(Trump) needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham texted Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, that day. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
If Ingraham was alarmed by the violence in the moment — five people died during the riot, including a Capitol police officer — she had swiftly put it behind her hours later. By the time her “Ingraham Angle” program aired that evening, she would be one of the most prominent media figures to push the baseless claim that the violence might not have been carried out by Trump supporters, but rather leftist Antifa protesters.
“Now they were likely not all Trump supporters and there are some reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd,” Ingraham said.
Hours before the network aired Ingraham’s contrived narrative, her Fox News colleague Brian Kilmeade used his primetime platform to perpetuate the twisted rationalization that the vicious actions of the Capitol rioters were somehow justified. Never mind that Kilmeade also texted Meadows earlier in the day that Trump was “destroying everything you have accomplished” by allowing the riots to continue.
“This is a culmination of four years of them denying the president won the election, claiming that Russians flip votes, this is four years of investigation, and there was four years now of a very frustrated electorate, 75 million that voted,” Kilmeade said on his news program. “They feel that they haven’t had their day in court, let alone lost in court.”
These texts were turned over by Meadows on Monday before the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack unanimously voted to charge him with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the inquiry. Included in the trove of texts to Meadows was a message from Trump’s own son, Donald Jr., demanding the chief of staff persuade his father to put an end to the violence, and Sean Hannity, the Fox anchor and Trump confidant who urged Meadows to have the president make a statement during the attack.
The messages to Meadows illuminate the appalling disconnect between the true feelings of an influential trio of Fox News anchors and the propaganda they spew from the television sets of millions of loyal viewers every night. While Ingraham, Kilmeade and Hannity will never be confused for actual journalists — they’ve been peddling political fictions long before their lodestar, Trump, was elected — the texts reveal that even their brief moments of conscientiousness are usurped by a base desire to treat even the stunning displays of anti-democratic behavior by the leader of the free world as grist for the entertainment mill.
The actions of these Fox anchors are flagrant examples of a conservative cable and radio media ecosystem that doubled as the publicity arm for the Trump administration. The text messages from Ingraham and Kilmeade in particular don’t express any genuine concern for the general well-being of law enforcement defending the Capitol or the larger implications for the demise of the peaceful transfer of power between administrations. Instead, the messages read like notes from loyalists who fear that their many evenings spent shilling for their favorite president were all for naught. Their side had already lost the election; now they risked losing their vice-like grip on the hearts and minds of their audience.
Anyone hoping the revelation of the Meadows messages will lead to repercussions or even a brief moment of self-reflection for Fox News will likely be disappointed. The network did not bother to air Monday night’s meeting of the House committee investigating Jan. 6. The corporate bosses have clearly made the calculation that throwing in their lot with dangerous conspiracy theorists is good business. Last month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson produced a three-part documentary, “Patriot Purge,” for the network’s streaming platform that contained the false claim that the Jan. 6 attack was a “false flag” operation meant to demonize the political right.
While a few Fox newscasters with integrity — including longtime anchor Chris Wallace — resigned in protest of the documentary, the network’s flagship personalities remain stalwarts. By the time you read this editorial, Ingraham, Kilmeade and Hannity will have probably taken to the airwaves to spin a new tale on how Democrats and the “corrupt” media are destroying America and the values that, you, the viewer hold most dearly.
Yet what these text messages make clear is just how much contempt these Fox figureheads hold for their audience. Their “news” segments drip with cynicism, nipping and tucking information to uphold a conservative agenda under the worn veneer of “both sides” messaging.
We hope and urge Fox News viewers to use the Meadows texts as reason enough to question the motivations of these messengers and search out more reliable sources of information, which, we admit can be hard to come by on TV and the internet these days. If you’re reading this, then you probably acknowledge on some level that real journalists strive to analyze facts objectively in our quest for a larger truth. Our business model relies on the assumption that the public believes the information we are delivering has been rigorously sourced and vetted, and that in the case of opinion journalism, it is rooted in fact. When even Fox News anchors don’t believe the misinformation they read from a teleprompter every night, it’s time to change the channel.