Tucker Carlson continues to lie to our nation
This is not a startling revelation, but Fox News host Tucker Carlson would rather subvert the truth than dig it up.
He has been doing it for years, as court filings in the $1.6 billion Dominion lawsuit against Fox News have revealed.
Dominion is the voter machine company former President Donald Trump, and his most fervent supporters, accused of fraud following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden won the race, fair and square, but the truth deterred neither Trump nor his enablers at Fox News, including its wildly popular host, Carlson.
On the air, night after night, Carlson and his colleagues endorsed the false claims of election rigging — claims that sparked the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. It was a different story, though, behind the scenes, where they disparaged the very sources who made the allegations.
Carlson went so far as to say he hated Trump “passionately.”
It was against this backdrop of deceit that House Speaker Kevin Mccarthy chose Carlson as the man to ferret out the “truth” regarding the Capitol riot.
Mccarthy provided Carlson with more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage. Never mind that the House Select Committee, led by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-miss., spent 18 months investigating the same assault.
Carlson was a curious choice to comb through the footage — unless you are seeking, not the truth, but what you would like the truth to be. Using that metric, Carlson, was the right man for the job. He is no investigative journalist, after all; he is to Bob Woodward what a Styrofoam cup is to the Holy Grail.
The Fox News host did not disappoint. He said the rioters were “meek” and “respectful,” calling them “sightseers,” not “insurrectionists.” The footage he selected for his program showed the insurrectionists strolling through the Capitol corridors, with no hint of violence and mayhem.
“Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you have heard about January 6,” Carlson said.
It was an outlandish display of cherry-picking, the implication being that a few moments of serenity overshadowed the hours of punching, kicking and, yes, killing. The rioters committed more than 1,000 assaults against federal police officers, prosecutors said. More than 140 officers were injured; one died due to the assault, while four others committed suicide in the days and months after the riot.
“The program conveniently cherrypicked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” Thomas Manger, the chief of the Capitol Police said. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.“i don’t have to remind you how outnumbered our officers were on January 6. Those officers did their best to use de-escalation tactics to try to talk rioters into getting each other to leave the building.”
Manger was one of many critics who condemned Carlson; many of the critics were Republicans who refused to let partisanship shade the truth.
“It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., said.
As a man who seems to regard integrity as a flaw, Mccarthy has defended his decision to release the footage to a man who holds the same view.
“I continue to hold that my job here, just like I was asked long before, is to make sure all the transparency comes out and that’s exactly what I’m doing,” Mccarthy said. Mccarthy did not explain how releasing the footage to a proven liar advances the cause of transparency. But this is the universe he and Carlson inhabit, a world where fiction is disguised as truth, and propaganda is viewed as journalism, regardless of the ultimate cost.
Fox News host cherry-picks ‘facts’ when discussing Capitol riot