Slate "Fox News Can Barely Admit the Capitol Riot Is a Story"
It was the week Trump was impeached for fomenting insurrection, and Fox’s hosts mostly railed against Twitter.
By JUSTIN PETERS
JAN 16, 20213:48 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/fox-news-impeachment-capitol-riot-twitter.html
On the morning of Monday, Jan. 11, as the flags over the U.S. Capitol remained at half-mast to honor the police officer killed by right-wing insurrectionists there, the hosts of Fox & Friends brought America’s early-rising crypto-fascists the day’s top story. “88 million Trump Twitter followers are without Donald Trump. Donald Trump loses 35 million Facebook followers, and the Parler [app on which] he was gaining on turbo speed, that is shut down. Because they decided they didn’t like it,” said co-host Brian Kilmeade. “This, to me, is a five-alarm fire for America.”
A five-alarm fire for America. While the roughly concurrent deplatforming of the president of the United States and a microblogging app popular among right-wingers is an important news story under any circumstances, Kilmeade’s assertion seemed more than a little overheated considering the bloody, historic context in which the bans occurred. After all, it was mere days after a mob, convened and incited by Donald Trump, toted the Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol and erected a gallows near the Capitol Reflecting Pool, while some in the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” This deadly riot was preceded by two months of lies about a “stolen” election, told by Trump and a cross-section of his enablers, as well as literally decades of scaremongering from Kilmeade’s employer about the character and intentions of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. It’s true that other right-wing outlets have done more than Fox News to promote the stolen-election lie, but that hardly absolves the network; just because Fox hasn’t been the most dishonest network over the past two months doesn’t mean it still hasn’t been consistently dishonest for years and years. The actual five-alarm fire was one that Trump and Fox News had themselves built, stoked, and tended up until the day it nearly consumed the republic.
Obviously, there can be multiple five-alarm fires raging at the same time—for more on this exciting prospect, please see my latest Chicago Fire spec script—but by any reasonable measure of newsworthiness, the siege of the federal legislature is clearly the fire that merits the most attention, especially from a flag-waving, law-and-order cable network such as Fox News. Right?
Wrong! By Monday morning, Fox News had all but moved on from the story of the Capitol riot, so eager was the network to get back to yelling about the suppressive left. Consigning the Capitol story to a series of passing references, for three hours Fox & Friends made a passionate case for the right of extremely online MAGA propagandists to be able to harass, incite, and misinform people free from any and all consequences.
snip - long article, worth reading, but no surprise to we here at DU.
= new reply since forum marked as read
