Fox: A culture of lying exposed
Fox News has been lying to viewers every day since Jan. 6, said S.E. Cupp in the New York Daily News. The right-wing cable network’s marquee hosts have spent the past year “dismissing the severity of the attempted coup,” blaming the FBI and antifa, and “grotesquely” handing out “best performance acting awards” to assaulted police officers. But the Fox hosts’ frantic text messages sent to former President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, which the House Jan. 6 panel released last week, leave “no doubt” these frauds were horrified by the insurrection. “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Laura Ingraham texted. “This is hurting all of us…he is destroying his legacy.” Sean Hannity urged that Trump “ask people to leave the Capitol.” And morning host Brian Kilmeade pleaded, “Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.”
Hannity “apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America,” said Kevin Williamson in NationalReview.com. He and his colleagues are now arguing that the Capitol attack was no different than the looting, arson, and rioting in Seattle; Portland, Ore.; and other cities in recent years. Well, “a riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.” And didn’t CNN fire Chris Cuomo recently for doing “precisely” what Hannity, Ingraham, and Kilmeade did—give secret advice to help a politician? The difference, said Jonah Goldberg in TheDispatch.com, is that most Fox hosts are utterly shameless in their lying, which is why I quit the network this year. Not incidentally, I often heard these propagandists say one thing about Trump and other topics “in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on.”
Fox isn’t the most-watched cable news network in spite of the lying, but because of it, said Adam Serwer in TheAtlantic.com. “From downplaying the deadliness of Covid” to spreading doubts about the vaccines, to promoting the Big Lie “that helped motivate the riot in the first place,” Fox tells viewers what they “want to hear,” not “what they ought to know.” As a result, conservative viewers are fiercely loyal to Fox and despise the so-called mainstream media. The network’s success “depends on maintaining a fantasy world, rather than doing anything to disturb it.”