Fox News is the most popular cable news station in America and is loved by conservatives, Republicans, and Trump devotees. However, its live coverage of Thursday’s Jan. 6, hearing was moved to Fox Business Network and its digital sites.
It would have been a disservice to core Fox News viewers to show the continuous documentation of the attack on Capitol in January 2017 and the parallel effort to stop the November 2020 presidential election. The two committee leaders, Reps. Bennie Thompson (a Democrat) and Liz Cheney (a Republican), were directly blamed by Trump for trying to instigate a coup.
The hearings would have required Fox to repeatedly broadcast contradictions of what Fox News’ leading personalities, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, have said to their audiences over the past year and half aEUR.” Their prime-time programs continued uninterrupted Thursday without commercial interruption, offering an alternative reality to a hearing that displayed vivid and bloody details of a national emergency.
They did not also point viewers to Fox’s coverage of the event on other platforms.
Thompson and Cheney both called out Fox personalities at the hearing, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. Thompson condemned conspiracy theories that were circulated to the public. Carlson, in a three-part series, famously promoted the idea that there was a “Patriot Purge.” He claimed that honorable citizens who participated in Jan. 6’s legal protest were being wrongly persecuted under the Biden administration. His series was based on claims that were largely discredited before he broadcast them.
Carlson claimed that Thursday’s hearing was propaganda even though he hadn’t seen it. Carlson dismissed the Capitol siege as vandalism. Many of the rioters were shouting for Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker at the time, and Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States.
Hannity also minimized the damage done, even though Cheney was reading aloud to Cheney, a Fox host and frequent Trump advisor’s texts for Kayleigh McEnany, Trump White House press secretary. Hannity cautioned Trump that he shouldn’t speak about the election being overturned. After the initial few days, Hannity downplayed the severity of the attacks.
Cheney noted that Trump’s last confirmed attorney general William Barr warned that claims of election fraud were unfounded and that claims that Dominion Voting Systems voting machines had been tampered was “crazy stuff”.
Fox News may not want to broadcast that live. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Fox was filled with similar claims from its hosts, personalities, and guests. Dominion sued Fox later in a $1.6 million defamation lawsuit that is still pending. Fox’s legal defense focuses on the argument that it was only covering a public discussion and statements by prominent figures. Fox News is not the exception. Fox News will not be broadcast live on Thursday night, nor in prime time.
