Fox’s lies about voter fraud helped fuel the Jan. 6 insurrection
House Hands Hens To Fox
Just four days after a court filing revealed Fox stars repeatedly calling the “stolen election” stories they promoted “crazy,” word leaked that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was handing Fox’s most prominent propagandist, Vladimir Putin apologist and conspiracy theorist — Tucker Carlson — about 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance tapes from the Jan. 6 insurrection, a move immediately blasted as a Capitol security and national security threat.
“It’s hard to overstate the potential security risks if this material were to be used irresponsibly,” Jan. 6 Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson said, when word leaked on Feb 20. Viewing all the tapes would provide comprehensive behind-the-scenes intelligence regarding security camera locations, security protocols, evacuation routes — everything that insurrectionists planning a future assault could possibly want to know.
“We were very careful to put together a very comprehensive video portrait of what happened that day,” said Jaime Raskin, who served with Thompson on the Jan. 6 Committee. “But we didn’t give away the location of cameras, we didn’t give away evacuation routes, escape pathways for the members of Congress.”
“These [tapes] are security footage,” said Donald Trump impeachment manager Rep. Madeleine Dean. “It is revealing of where the Capitol police are and different staging, what was going on. It would give access to bad actors to try to do it again. So it’s extraordinarily irresponsible.”
McCarthy, who promised to release the tapes as part of his campaign for House Speaker, tried to spin the release as an act of transparency, saying the tapes “belong to the American public.” But he didn’t give the tapes to the American people. He gave them to Tucker Carlson — a man who created a three-part conspiracy-riddled pseudo-documentary, Patriot Purge, in 2021 arguing that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation, “being used as a pretext to strip millions of Americans — disfavored Americans — of their core constitutional rights, and to defame them as domestic terrorists.”
“Can you imagine if the Jan. 6 Select Committee had done this? Given materials to one network, much less one host,” said Raskin. “There would have rightfully been a scandal about it. And so when Kevin McCarthy says he wants to give it to the American people, but it’s going to be filtered through the prism of Tucker Carlson, I think it shows how distorted and deranged his politics have become.”
In Patriot Purge, Carlson argued that, “The
very same corrupt interests in Washington that pushed the Iraq War under false pretenses are now pushing the lie of a domestic white terror,” as if he himself hadn’t pushed the Iraq War under false pretenses.
But Carlson himself has been a promoter of domestic white terror. And it’s no lie: The most recent annual report on murder and extremism in the U.S. from the Anti-Defamation league, released on Feb. 22, reported that “domestic extremists killed at least 25 people” and “All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” with 21 linked to white supremacists.
Now McCarthy has handed him the most sensitive inside information about the Jan. 6 attack, so that he can manufacture an even slicker false narrative than the one he did in 2021.
Two long-time paid contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, quit Fox in protest of Patriot Purge, calling it a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, which is “riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery and damning omissions,” and warning of Carlson’s danger. “If a person with such a platform shares such misinformation loud enough and long enough, there are Americans who will believe — and act upon — it,” they wrote. “This isn’t theoretical. This is what actually happened on January 6, 2021.”
Now McCarthy has handed him the most sensitive inside information about the Jan. 6 attack, so that he can manufacture an even slicker false narrative than the one he did in 2021.
On Feb. 24, two groups of news organizations wrote to McCarthy, requesting he actually provide the transparent access he touted.
Fox’s Election Lies Revealed
“Sydney Powell is lying.” That quote from Carlson on Nov. 16, 2020 is the very first line in Dominion Voting System’s motion for summary judgment in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox. Powell was then the leading lawyer pushing baseless voter fraud claims, and Carlson had written privately three days earlier “that Trump needed to concede and agreed that ‘there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome’ of the election,” the motion went on to say.
The motivation was fear of losing its audience base to more extremist alternatives, after Fox’s decision desk was the first to call Arizona for Biden on Nov. 4 and then followed other networks in declaring that Biden had won on Nov. 7, once the Pennsylvania outcome was clear. “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted that day. “We’re playing with fire, for real ... an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”
“If responsible journalism by a handful of Fox people resulted in a company crisis, that means the company is not a news company — because giving truthful news actually was a big problem,” said NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen on MSNBC.
Rather than a news company, “I see Fox as the commercial wing of the MAGA movement that has overtaken the Republican party. And what it makes is resentment news — who to resent, what’s new and different to resent,” Rosen said. “That kind of product, resentment news, can also become a source of power,” he added. “Both the Republican party and Fox News have had to learn that this power of resentment can be turned against them.”
With that kind of motivation still driving them, neither Carlson, nor anyone else at Fox is about to produce a report on Jan. 6 that casts the insurrectionists in a bad light. They just can’t afford to tell their audience the truth.