America Airlines – Fox News helped create the Big Lie. Now, as his rating plummets, he can’t escape it – Latest News, Breaking News, Top News Headlines
America’s most militarized Inauguration Day in modern history is the one we witnessed on Wednesday, when Joe Biden was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, surrounded by 25,000 National Guard soldiers, armored vehicles and barbed wire. .
The National Mall, which was packed for Barack Obama’s ceremony and slightly less for Donald Trump’s, was closed to the public. Things are so dire since the deadly raid on the US Capitol on January 6 by pro-Trump extremists that American Airlines is suspending alcohol service on all flights to and from Washington, DC, until January 21.
If only Sean Hannity could be removed from the menu, like a bottle of vodka.
It is doubtful that Trump could have radicalized as many Americans as he has done without the help of the media giant, Fox News. Hannity, along with her colleagues Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and the rest of the team have been instrumental in embedding Trump’s far-right positions across the board from immigration to policing, repeating his lies and threats and giving credence to his absurd conspiracy theories, including the discredited claims of election fraud that led to the Capitol uprising. And if there is any doubt about how the conservative news network became a legitimator of this propaganda and “deep state” fantasies, the broadcast of Fox News has been televised.
The jewel in the crown of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, in the United States at least, has propagated many of the Trump administration’s most important and damaging falsehoods, several in the service of exonerating or supporting the president himself in times of scandal or crisis. (Which, as we’ve all experienced first-hand, was essentially his entire term.)
Staff member Seth Rich involved in the Democratic National Congress party email leak! Migrant caravans on the border plagued by MS-13 gang members! Hunter Biden’s laptop! COVID-19 is a hoax! Stop the robbery!
But years of staunch support for the president, which includes sowing mistrust over anything that challenges the White House narrative, is beginning to have consequences.
Fox News’ unholy alliance with Trump brought with it white supremacists, obnoxious militias and conspiracy theorists who believe that the former president is the only person standing between humanity and an infamous circle of cannibalistic pedophiles and Satan worshipers.
The news organization’s ratings have been on the decline since Election Day, something many attribute to competition from the media even further to the right; on Tuesday, political director Chris Stirewalt and others were fired.
Now, when Trump has left office, the cable news network that fueled his rise to power is faced with an unpleasant dilemma of its own making: continue to feed the monster it helped create or be destroyed by its anger.
Fox News is not the only media company promoting the lies of ‘Trumpism’. Newsmax, “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” One America News, Breitbart and Parler are, to varying degrees, sources of misinformation and active cheerleaders for the president.
The social media giants that refused, in most cases, to clamp down on viral conspiracy theories and hate speech during the Trump era, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are also complicit.
But since before the 2016 Republican primaries, Fox News has arguably been the highest-profile pro-Trump provocateur, alongside the president himself.
Sean Hannity on Fox News on August 14, 2017, discussing the events surrounding that summer’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
(Fox News / YouTube.com)
Fox News did not go from being “fair and balanced” to the de facto arm of the White House communications department overnight. As the 2019 Showtime docudrama “The Loudest Voice,” reminds us, former CEO Roger Ailes initiated the conservative network’s shift to the right, toward fear and outrage, after 9/11.
By 2009, its primetime hosts, including Hannity, were defending and amplifying the videos of conservative James O’Keefe, eager for covert “revelations” of liberal hypocrisy. Fox News covered O’Keefe’s “investigations” challenging community organizing group ACORN often and with great enthusiasm, but little scrutiny despite the dubious provenance of the video.
His powerful attention contributed to the dissolution of the nonprofit in the United States, although O’Keefe’s work was later discredited as being misleadingly obtained and edited.
The racist Obama birthplace conspiracy, touted by then-reality TV star Trump, and echoed by Fox News, was the next step in undermining trust. Although many other media gave the ex-president’s outlandish claims a platform they did not deserve.
Called to “Lock her up!” Based once again on carefully selected facts and outright lies about 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, now with an added distaste for the rule of law, they were not far behind.
Once Trump took office, the last barriers to the truth seemed to be lifted, and Fox News, which is no stranger to the benefits of deregulation, jumped right in to defend and criticize the president, or at least to let his lies not. were questioned. Almost as often, the process seemed to work in reverse: In the early days of his tenure, he sparked an international incident after citing a fictional terrorist attack in Sweden. Its source? Carlson.
By presenting falsehoods about Rich’s involvement in the Democratic National Committee email leak during the 2016 campaign, and by legitimizing the cruel conspiracy theories about his 2016 shooting death, in what police have said was likely a attempted robbery, several of the network’s hosts went further and landed their employer in legal trouble.
“This completely takes the entire narrative of collusion with Russia out of the water,” Hannity noted. When Fox News backed off the story, Hannity was adamant: “I’m not Fox.com or FoxNews.com,” she commented on her radio show. “I didn’t back down from anything.”
Rich’s parents sued the network for its repeated false claims about their son and the case was settled in the millions, before Hannity and Dobbs testified under oath in the case.
The fact that Trump and his supporters at Fox News frequently viewed the subsequent investigation into the now-ex-president’s ties to Russia as a “witch hunt” suggests that the cruelty of a dead man’s reputation was not exactly a punishing experience.
Special counsel Robert Mueller became the new target, as did the highest levels of the American police. “A cleanup is needed in our FBI and in the Department of Justice,” criticized Fox News anchor Jeanine Pirro. “Cleanse themselves of people who not only need to be fired, but need to be taken out and handcuffed.”
When newly emboldened white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, in what now reads as a clear precursor to the attack on the Capitol, and where a right-wing car struck counter-protesters and killed one, Trump he said there were “very good people on both sides.”
Tucker Carlson on the set of his Fox News show in Manhattan in 2018.
(Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times)
Fox News, now locked in the pattern, followed suit. Hannity aired the lie on her radio show that the protesters at the rally may have been “actors hired by an advertising company.” Carlson made his own mix of “both sides” in a widely maligned segment, calling “the left” “as obsessed with race” as the white supremacists of “Unite the Right.”
All of that was just in Trump’s first year.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Fox News was prepared to defend the Republican president at all costs, even if it meant putting viewers’ lives in danger. Several personalities and guests on the air reinforced the idea that the pandemic was a hoax invented by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (Democrat of California) and her friends.
“This is another attempt to impeach the president,” Fox Business host Trish Regan said before being fired for her comments. Hannity went further: “They’re really scaring people off, and I see it again as, ‘Oh, we’re going to hit Trump with this new hoax.”
The election presented a new enigma. Although the network’s decision-making table received legitimate applause and drew the ire of the president for sticking to the facts and documenting Biden’s election, several of his hosts backed Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the electoral process had been stolen.
Watchdog group Media Matters reported that the news network cast doubt on the results nearly 800 times, in the two-week period alone after Biden emerged as the victor.
“He should be outraged, he should be concerned, he should be disturbed by what happened in the elections and the run-up,” Hannity said. “And frankly, he should be angry with what is being built and built and built in the last four years, in this all-out assault on a duly elected president, whom we, the people, chose.”
The real “all-out assault” that had been “building and building and building for the last four years” was a transgression of the truth itself, largely led by Hannity and her kind, and apparently escaping the control of the network. . Myths about widespread electoral fraud were easy to sell after the company’s incessant information warfare and the gradual attempt to normalize the outlandish conspiracies.
Now, Fox News seems ready to redouble its preference for opinion on the news and for personalities like María Bartiromo, standing to support Trump and his followers at all costs.
But the fear and outrage that Fox News has inspired is all too real and shifting, not just audience patterns, but the political landscape itself.
Following the terrorist attack on Capitol Hill under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” it is not just politicians who are held accountable for incitement. It is also media outlets like Fox News that happily fashioned and sold the Big Lie and must now face, if there is any justice, the monsters of their own making.
To read this note in Spanish, click here
