Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham vociferously defended themselves for sending text messages on Jan. 6 urging Mark Meadows, the last White House chief of staff under Donald J. Trump, to persuade the then-president to take action. to undertake to attack the Capitol.
The lyrics made something alive that was already no secret — that key players at the network have acted as informal advisers to Mr. Trump. It’s a situation that violates journalistic ethical standards, but doesn’t seem to deter Fox viewers. In November, Fox News was the most watched network, not just in cable news, but in all of cable television, with an average audience of 1.5 million.
Mr. Hannity and Ms. Ingraham said Tuesday that their lyrics — read aloud in Congress Monday night by Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney — were no different from their public statements that day.
The two said the pro-Trump siege on Jan. 6 — in which rioters broke into the Capitol Building, injured police officers, caused millions of dollars in damage and killed one rioter — was similar to previous civil unrest incidents, the two said. adding that it was exaggerated by other news media. Their on-air statements continue their vigorous defense of Mr Trump 11 months after his bid to undermine the election and his encouragement of the mob carrying out the violence.
The text messages also suggested that the hosts believed Mr Trump — who had delivered a belligerent speech on the Ellipse near the White House in the hours before the breach to thousands of his supporters — bore some responsibility for what happened that day.
“Mark, the president needs to tell the people in the Capitol to go home,” Ms. Ingraham wrote. “This hurts us all. He is destroying his legacy.”
Brian Kilmeade, a host of “Fox & Friends”, echoed that concern. “Please put it on TV,” he wrote in a text message to Mr. Meadows. “Destroy all that you have achieved.”
mr. Hannity texted: “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”
Ann Marie Lipinski, a former editor of The Chicago Tribune who heads the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, said the Fox News hosts had violated journalistic standards by sending advice to a White House official as the news unfolded.
“For there to be an ongoing, live violent riot at the Capitol with anchors communicating their preferences about what the president should do to the president’s staff is inappropriate to say the least and highly unethical in my view,” Ms. Lipinski said.
“I think that’s part of the bargain Fox News offers its viewers – ‘We have a different relationship with the government and a different relationship with the Republican Party,'” she added. “I think viewers are going for it for the most part.”
Understand the US Capitol Riots
On January 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
A Fox News representative declined to comment on this article. The network has not made a public statement about the text messages.
On Tuesday, after showing a clip of Ms. Cheney reading aloud the text she had sent to Mr. Meadows, Ms. Ingraham, who hosts “The Ingraham Angle,” accused “the regime media” of “something way to twist this message into trying to call me a liar, a hypocrite who sounded the alarm privately on January 6, but publicly downplayed it.”
On his show, Mr. Hannity mounted a showdown between Geraldo Rivera and Dan Bongino, a right-wing polemicist who joined the channel in 2019.
“This was a riot that was unleashed, incited and inspired by the President of the United States, who attacked the heart of American democracy,” Rivera said on the program.
mr. Hannity said to Mr. Rivera told him to stop talking and reminded his viewers that his guest’s words only represented his opinion. He then turned to the House inquiry and said, “The question is, this corrupt commission. The question is, why these riots and not 574 other riots?”
After Mr. Rivera asked the host to “remember what state of mind you were in when you wrote that text on Jan. 6,” Mr. Hannity gave it to Mr. Bongino.
“Stabing in the back of the president you’re doing is really disgusting,” Mr. Bongino told Mr. Rivera.
The close relationship between Mr. Trump and Fox News began in 2011, when Mr. Trump appeared as a weekly contributor to “Fox & Friends”. After he took office, Mr. Trump and Fox News grew closer. The president, as well as his advisers, allies and family members, became regulars on the channel, and the primetime hosts largely promoted his policies.
After the election, some anchors at Fox News and its corporate brother Fox Business Network were accused of providing a venue for Mr Trump’s false conspiracy theory that voting machines had been manipulated, a theory endorsed Jan. 6 by the violent agitators. Smartmatic, an election technology company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox, naming anchors Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as defendants. In March, Dominion Voting Systems filed a lawsuit seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox. Both lawsuits are pending. Fox wants to drop both lawsuits.
For the past 11 months, Fox News prime-time hosts have downplayed the Capitol siege. In a July episode, Ms. Ingraham said that “many riots in American history,” including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, “were much worse than this.”
In September, Tucker Carlson, the top-rated host in cable news, showed clips from January 6 and said of the people in the Capitol: “They don’t look like terrorists. They look like tourists.”
Key Aspects of the Jan 6 Inquiry
“They were not insurgents,” he continued. “They shouldn’t have been there. They were not trying to overthrow the government. That’s a total mess.”
In November, Mr. Carlson released a three-part special about the January 6th attack, “Patriot Purge,” made for the streaming platform Fox Nation. It contained the unfounded suggestion that the riots were a so-called “false flag” operation designed to demonize the political right.
There was internal disagreement. Mr. Rivera, who joined Fox News in 2001, publicly criticized the Carlson special. So did two conservative Fox News employees, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, who quit in protest.
mr. Hannity has also downplayed the riots. Last week, when Mr. Meadows was a guest on his program, he took the opportunity to praise how Mr. Trump had addressed the events of the day and said he “condemned” the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6.
mr. Hannity’s close relationship with the former president is well known. In 2018, he appeared alongside Mr Trump at a campaign rally. Fox News chided him for that display of bias, saying in a statement at the time, “This was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.”
The disclosure of the three hosts’ communications on January 6 with Mr. Meadows made headlines nine days after DailyExpertNews fired Chris Cuomo, a termination that came days after a report released by the New York Attorney General gave new details about the anchor’s role in advising his brother, Andrew. Cuomo, the former governor of New York, when he was charged with sexual harassment.
Fox News has made a comeback in ratings since a year ago, when it lost some viewers to Newsmax, a competing conservative news network. The plunge in ratings came after Fox News made the first prediction that Joseph R. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump in the key state of Arizona on election night.
In the months following the Arizona call, as Fox appeared to affirm its pro-Trump stance, the network fired an experienced political editor, Chris Stirewalt, and liberal commentator Donna Brazile left the channel, while another, Juan Williams, said: The Five” left. .”
Chris Wallace, who presented “Fox News Sunday,” was one of the channel’s anchors describing a link between the January 6 violence and Mr Trump’s rhetoric. “You had the President for an hour on the Ellipse fill a crowd with false statements, with facts absolutely torn apart in state courts, in federal courts, by Trump judges, by a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, by Trump’s own Attorney General. ‘ said Mr. Wallace on a broadcast that day. He had also expressed concerns about the Carlson special to Fox News management.
On Sunday, after 18 years with Fox News, Mr. Wallace left Fox News for a new job at DailyExpertNews.