Media
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According to a March 3, 2023 analysis by The New York Times:
On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four – National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News – have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since February 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly.
The majority – 18 in all, including Fox News itself – did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff (some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)
Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.
In fact, within the first two weeks of the release of the treasure trove of Fox’s private messages, the only time the Dominion lawsuit was mentioned at all on Fox News was when the host of MediaBuzz Howard Kurtz told his viewers, “I believe I should be covering it. But the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”
This is just vile conduct. How could people at Fox blatantly mislead their audience, who obviously trusted them and relied on them for THE TRUTH. We honestly don’t know how they slept at night.
One of the most damaging examples of Fox News’ duplicitous behavior happened on January 6th – as the Capitol assault was happening and then after it ended – when Fox hosts sent concerned text messages to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, then went on television and told their audience something completely different.
The evening of January 6th, Fox hosts repeatedly told their viewers that what happened at the Capitol wasn’t really that bad, or was caused by Antifa of course, or that it was a “false flag” operation conceived and carried out by the United States government. They said things like “many riots in American history, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, were far worse than this” (Laura Ingraham), or “(the rioters) don’t look like terrorists. They look like tourists” (Tucker Carlson).
On her show, Laura Ingraham told viewers that Trump supporters had virtually nothing to do with the mayhem: “From a chaotic Washington tonight, earlier today the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement,” and then perpetuated the this is all Antifa b.s. that we covered in another section. However, behind the scenes that day, Ingraham texted to Trump’s chief of staff things like: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
During the day, Sean Hannity also texted Mark Meadows: “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.” However, on his show that evening, he tried hard to distract his audience with shiny objects: “Our election, frankly, was a train wreck.” Then quickly followed up with an impressive pivot: “So how were officials not prepared? We got to answer that question. How did they allow the Capitol building to be breached in what seemed like less than a few minutes?”
But, as usual, the worst offender that day was Tucker Carlson. Thank God this man is finally off the Fox airwaves, but to the three million people who bought – or may still buy into – Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson’s idiocy, we gotta tell ya, we are dumbfounded by the fact that anyone would listen to a word this guy says. As long as we live, we will never understand it.
We could give endless examples of why we feel this way, but by far the most damaging thing Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson has done, and continues to do, is sling outright lies and propaganda about the January 6th insurrection, which includes producing and airing a “documentary” called Patriot Purge, which claimed that January 6th was a “false flag” operation carried out by the U.S. government to target Trump supporters. The film’s trailer bills it as “the true story behind 1/6” and “the War on Terror 2.0 and the plot against the people.”
In Tucker’s own words, “January 6 is being used as a pretext to strip millions of Americans – disfavored Americans – of their core constitutional rights.” Then he said: “The helicopters have left Afghanistan, and now they’ve landed here at home.” Then this: “Our conclusion? The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror. But it’s not against al-Qaida, it’s against American citizens.”
Oh, for the love of #@^%.
As a result of Carlson’s propaganda, two longtime Fox News conservative contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, quit in protest, calling the film “totally outrageous” and saying that it “will lead to violence.” Chris Wallace, the longtime Fox News anchor, resigned from the network after 18 years. Although he didn’t specify the film as a specific reason for his exit, we do know that he raised significant concerns with the Fox News brass.
Then, in February 2023, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Carlson exclusive access to over 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from January 6th. The evening Tucker started showing the videos to his audience, he opened the show by repeating that the “2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy given the facts that have since emerged about that election. No honest person can deny it.” He went on to say, predictably, that most people who stormed the Capitol were not insurrectionists at all, but merely “orderly and meek” sightseers.
Much of the footage he chose to show focused on Jacob Chansley (a.k.a. the “QAnon Shaman”), who was not difficult to pick out of the crowd since he was wearing that horned hat and animal fur getup. The cherry-picked footage showed Chansley calmly walking around the building, sometimes near police officers – somehow forgetting to mention that Chansley pled guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding and was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
The very thought that an American – any American – would knowingly push these blatant lies is horrifying. But it is reprehensible for a network who claims to traffic in “news” to allow it. James Murdoch, the younger son of Fox Corp. owner Rupert, said it best: “The damage is profound. The sacking of the Capitol is proof positive that what we thought was dangerous is indeed very much so. Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.”
< Note: James left his position as chief executive officer of 21st Century Fox in 2019, then resigned from the board of News Corp in July 2020 because of disagreements with its editorial content and strategic direction. He and other members of the Murdoch family have been involved in a court case in which James, his sister Elisabeth, and half-sister Prudence were challenging Rupert’s bid to amend the family trust to ensure that the eldest son Lachlan retained control of News Corp and Fox Corp. In the end, Rupert and Lachlan bought the other three siblings out – ensuring that both companies will stay true to their deep conservative identity. >
Unfortunately, the misinformation onslaught from conservative media during that time went beyond Fox News and it's sycophant anchors. On December 9, 2020 – a month after the election and less than a month before the Capitol attacks – the late Rush Limbaugh told his audience of over 15 million people listening on roughly 600 radio stations across the nation: “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I am not advocating it, have not advocated it, never have advocated it, and probably wouldn’t,” but liberals use “force and intimidation and bullying tactics to get people who disagree with them to shut up.”
On December 16th, Rush said that Joe Biden “didn’t win this thing fair and square, and we are not going to be docile like we’ve been in the past and go away and wait till the next election.” He continued, “Seventy-four-plus million Americans are not going to shut up, and you tell them that their views don’t matter? You do not know what you’re creating. You do not know the enemy you are manufacturing.”
Two days before the Capitol assault, radio host Glenn Beck told his 10.5 million listeners that it was “time to fight.” “It is time to rip and claw and rake,” he said. “It is time to go to war, as the left went to war four years ago.” In his Christmas broadcast, Mark Levin told his equally large radio audience that stealing elections was “becoming the norm for the Democrat Party” and that they needed to “crush them, crush them. We need to kick their ass.” Meanwhile, broadcasting from Cincinnati two days before the attack, Bill Cunningham told his listeners that he would “never surrender and collapse and act as if it’s OK when hundreds of thousands have voted illegally.”
A day before the Capitol attacks, Dan Bongino told his audience that Democrats “rigged the rules to make sure that any potential outcome would go their way.” In fact, former police officer, Secret Service agent, and three-time failed congressional candidate Bongino was one of the most prolific voices of election fraud. In the two weeks before and two weeks after the 2020 election, Bongino’s posts were among the day’s 10 most shared on Facebook at least 63 times. That’s way better than even Trump did!
Okay, we admit this all sounds spine-chilling and a bit depressing, but we have a message for all the actual reporters and journalists out there: Don’t lose heart! There are many worthwhile paths you can travel in your career, from being a traditional news reporter to being an opinion writer or cable commentator. But it’s super important you choose one or another because the lines get too blurry otherwise. You must choose because we obviously need you, badly.
If you’re still wondering if you should be worried about all this, then just listen to what Peter Pomerantsev has to say. Peter was born in the Soviet Union (Ukraine) then moved to London then moved back to Russia, where he became involved in Russian television production (he is now a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics and an associate editor at Coda Media).
In his production job in Russia, he saw first-hand how state propaganda is spread. Speaking to The Washington Post in March 2021 about Fox News and how the channel reminds him of Russia, he said, “It’s the same game. It’s the same rhetorical tactics, the same intellectual tactics, the same psychological tactics.” Uh oh.
In an article that he himself wrote, Peter uses Sean Hannity as an example of Russian-style propaganda, which he calls the “dirtiest art form”:
The typical Hannity monologue rises in a series of rhetorical questions until it topples over the edge of sense. On March 27, 2017, for example, a two-minute-long series of questions attacked rival network CBS’s objectivity by asking whether its presenters ever questioned their criticism of George W. Bush, whether they spiked stories which made Obama look bad, whether they had investigated Obama’s ties to a former terrorist, his commitment to American-hating ‘Black liberation theology’ or recorded Obama’s economic failings (here Hannity showed a list of stats on the screen, too briefly to read fully).
Had CBS, Hannity went on, listed all the laws Hillary Clinton violated when she used a private email server as Secretary of State? Exposed every one of her lies about the death of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi? Explored how media colluded with the Clinton campaign? Questioned how much time they had given to the ‘conspiracy theory’ that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia?
The effect of such a long list, where some of the charges are serious, others spurious, many debatable, and none explored, is to leave the mind exhausted and confused. The semantic patterns reinforce Hannity’s main message: That we live in a world where there is no epistemological certainty anymore. For anyone familiar with Russian media this radical relativism is something very familiar.
Perhaps the best example of these mind games is the way conservative media weaponizes language to enflame its viewers. This not only deepens the division in this country, but it also prevents us from having constructive conversations about really important issues.
We recognize it may feel like we're picking on conservative media but, even though both sides do this to a certain degree – and without a doubt, MSNBC went further and further down the rabbit hole over the course of the initial Trump years – right-wingers are the ones who have turned this tactic into a true artform. It would be impressive if it wasn’t seriously damaging our country.
That they do this – on purpose – is not our opinion, it’s a fact. We haven’t cracked some secret code or anything …many conservatives openly admit this is their strategy. For example, conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo laid out (on Twitter, in detail) his and his buddies’ plan for metastasizing the concept of critical race theory.
Encyclopedia Britannica defines critical race theory (CRT) as “an intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed, culturally invented category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and non-whites, especially African Americans.”
Before we go any further, let us be clear: We are not defending critical race theory. In fact, our point here has nothing to do with the virtues or inadequacies of critical race theory at all.
Our point is that we cannot let a few rhetorical snipers at Fox News and other conservative media outlets – together with Republican politicians – highjack then pervert our national conversations, especially those about race, which is one of the most important conversations the current residents of this nation will ever have.
We are finally getting somewhere on this topic, America (which is probably why the snipers are freaking out.) If we allow antagonists to disrupt our progress, we will forfeit the best chance we have had in decades of developing an honest, productive path forward.
Because levelheaded conversations about things like race are so central to our national growth, we believe it’s super important that we recognize how these guys try to derail them. We cannot allow this one small group of people to preemptively define what these conversations look like for everyone – because we promise you, they will define the entire thing to their sole advantage.