“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
--Text from Fox News' star personality Laura Ingraham to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows while Donald Trump stood by as rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6 (as read on the House floor by Representative Liz Cheney).
Conservative Jonah Goldberg (until recently a Fox News contributor) comments on this text (and those sent to Meadows by Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade):
The significance of those texts isn’t that they recognized the truth of that day. What’s relevant is the contrast of that private behavior with their public behavior over the 11 months that followed.
. . .
Last night, Laura Ingraham made a huge deal of the fact that she condemned the violence on her show on the evening of January 6. . . .
What she didn’t say is that the mob’s passions boiled over because of Donald Trump’s lies—and the megaphone she and her colleagues gave to those lies. From her texts it’s reasonable to assume that she believed—rightly—that this mob was Trump’s to command because the mob believed it was doing Trump’s bidding.
But that truth is what she left out that night—and, as far as I can tell, every night since. In other words, the central truth of the texts isn’t that what the mob was doing was condemnable, but that Trump was responsible for the condemnable behavior.
Trump was responsible (as Kevin McCarthy, Lindsay Graham, and countless other Republicans initially acknowledged after January 6 before turning their backs on truth). And of course, as Goldberg describes, there's FNC's inevitable whataboutism to evade the truth:
The whole point of these whataboutist games is to exempt yourself from consistency. If your only goal in pointing out this double standard is to let Trump off the hook for arguably worse behavior, you’re adopting the same double standard you claim to be condemning.
This kind of thing has been the overriding ethos of Fox opinion hosts and pundits for five years (with a few honorable exceptions). It wasn’t always explicitly whataboutist. Sometimes the whataboutism was simply implied. Don’t talk about Trump’s lies, mistakes, or misdeeds, just focus on the hypocrisy or hysteria of liberals who point out Trump’s lies, mistakes, or misdeeds. Sometimes the technique becomes so ingrained there’s no double standard at all, simply a ridiculous non-sequitur. “Democrats are arguing that Trump welcomed and incited a violent incursion into the Capitol,” Laura Ingraham once fumed, “when it is they who are enticing illegals to bust through our borders, exploit our resources, and commit crimes.” Uh, what?
Frank Bruni sums up Fox News' critical role in promoting the Big Lie and the consequences:
You can delve into the weeds of this or you can pull back and survey the whole ugly yard. And what you see when you do that — what matters most in the end — is that Fox News has helped to sell the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and there’s a direct line from that lie to the rioting. There’s a direct line from that lie to various Republicans’ attempts to develop mechanisms to overturn vote counts should they dislike the results.
That lie is the root of the terrible danger that we’re in, with Trump supporters being encouraged to distrust and undermine the democratic process. And that lie has often found a welcome mat at Fox News.
Adam Serwer observes that lies -- outrageous, deliberate, conscious lies -- are indispensable to Fox News' popularity as king of conservative media:
It’s common to say that conservatives distrust the media, but conservative viewers trust Fox about as much as Democrats trust CNN. The fact that its most popular personalities consciously lie to their audiences has not diminished that trust; it has made Fox the most successful cable-news channel. It is difficult then, to argue that inaccuracy is what has eroded other outlets’ trust with conservatives—the reverse is true. More factual coverage would not strengthen Fox News’s bond with its viewers; it would likely drive them elsewhere. The outlet shapes this demand, but it also bends to it.
A conservative news outlet that sought to compete on accuracy would maintain standards of rigor that would not allow its most famous ambassadors to knowingly lie to their viewers, or it would sanction them for doing so. But Fox News understands that its success depends on maintaining a fantasy world, rather than doing anything to disturb it. This is why some of its most marquee personalities, who shared the same horror as most other Americans at the events of January 6, caked on their makeup, stared into the camera, and lied to the people who trust them the most. What makes Fox News unique is not that it is conservative, but that its on-air personalities understand that telling lies is their job. Their texts on January 6, and their conduct since, leave no other conclusion.
Fox News' stars understand that telling lies is their job. FNC strives to maintain a fantasy world, which brought us the Big Lie, a Republican base convinced of the Big Lie, the January 6 storming of the Capitol, voter suppression, and a scramble to change state laws to permit (small-d) democratic elections to be overturned by Republican officials and state legislatures.
Our democracy is in peril. The conservative media universe, with Fox News Channel at the pinnacle, has peddled -- and often manufactured -- the lies that got us here.