Fox News Blames Biden for Everything, Milks the Oscar Slap for All it’s Worth and Tucker Continues to Promote Russian Craziness
A condensed overview of 15 hours of Fox News week ending 4/3/22
Viewers of Fox this past week would have had no idea unemployment is the lowest it’s been since the pandemic started, they might also think the U.S. is funding secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and that the Will Smith slap at the Oscars had somehow altered the course of human history.
Sunday night as I was on my Twitter account promoting some clip I had created for this account I noticed a crazy amount of activity around the Oscars awards show. Will Smith had slapped Chris Rock over a bad joke about Will’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
It seemed immediately after the slap, all 217 million daily Twitter users had something to say about it.
I had a feeling Fox would run with this but I even I underestimated how much focus they would put on the story. Here’s my tweet from the early a.m. hours of Monday morning.
An hour later Fox & Friends led with the story.
What made things even more awkward was the news bumper filled with graphic images from the war in Ukraine. After about 30 seconds of tightly edited clips of human carnage in Ukraine, the camera cuts to the Fox & Friends set in New York City, some dippy theme music cuts in and we hear the disembodied voice of Steve Doocy say “It’s three a.m. in Los Angeles” as he then started the story about Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars.
Clip of the Week
Later in the day Jesse Watters and other member of the cast of “The Five” also made racist comments about Will Smith. Greg Gutfeld managed to work Alec Baldwin’s accidental shooting on the set of Rust into the discussion.
Tucker Carlson was surprisingly reserved about the incident. He waited to even address it until the second half of his show and didn’t say much new about it. Carlson had Peirs Morgan on during the segment and Morgan did most of the talking.
Morgan focused how the moment was the most authentic thing he’d ever seen at the awards show.
The way Fox News handled the Will Smith story really shouldn’t have surprised me as they heavily pushed the Jussie Smollett trial when seemingly no other news outlet did.
Since I started covering the network in mid-February several stories involving Black people have been completely ignored.
A recap of stories Fox News completely ignored in the past:
The federal hate crimes trial of the men convicted for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery
The conviction of the three former police officers who present during the murder of George Floyd.
The trial for a former officer charged in the raid that resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor.
WNBA player Brittney Griner, imprisoned in Russia on drug charges
There’s an obvious pattern. Stories where Black people are victimized are not given any airtime or very little focus. When a Black person commits a crime or some type of offense Fox News overly promotes it.
I suspected Fox would really push the Will Smith incident but I was blown away that they talked about it for the entire week. “Fox & Friends” included two short segments about it on both Monday and Thursday in the first hour.
Normally I save the data for the top five topics covered by Fox News and the PBS NewsHour but this week I’m including those charts higher up in the newsletter because what they show is so striking.
Fox News thought it was a good idea to dedicate as much time to Will Smith’s slap as it was to the war in Ukraine. They also stepped up their criticism of Biden to a level I’d never witnessed before.
PBS NewsHour handled the slap quite differently. They dedicated equal time to showcase the diverse winners that night, and only addressed the scandal two nights last week. The network also had a Black media critic, Eric Deggans, of NPR on to discuss Will Smith’s actions.
On Thursday they invited two Black academics, Eisa Nefertari Ulen of Hunter College and Mark Anthony Neal of Duke University to unpack the public’s reaction to the event.
PBS also had an extended segment mid-week to showcase the deaf performer who won for best supporting actor.
Tucker Carlson Tinfoil Hat Happy Hour
I basically sum up in this video everything I’ve found out about this story in an extremely condensed two minutes.
I would write it all out but I hate giving any conspiracy theory too much credence. A bulleted list will cover it. Most of what I lay out here is explained in far greater detail in The Washington Post article “The Truth about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian ‘bio labs’”
The bio labs aren’t secret, they are used to study diseases and to try to prevent or mitigate pandemics.
We funds labs like this in several countries.
The labs have nothing to do with bioweapons.
Russia has been trying to promote fake stories about these labs since 2011.
A QAnon supporter named @WarClandestine created a conspiracy theory about the labs that spread rapidly through right wing circles.
Russia took the theory and added Hunter Biden and George Soros.
Some emails were discovered between Hunter Biden and a company called Metabiota.
The emails might have come from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Metabiota is a San Francisco based company that acts like a staffing agency to labs like this all over the world.
The company does most of its business in Africa. Ukraine accounts for a tiny fraction of its business.
At the time of the emails, the Metabiota was trying to get the firm Hunter was working with to help finance a new insurance product they were trying to sell.
Hunter got kicked out of the firm for cocaine use.
The insurance product never got off the ground.
Sources
“The Truth about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian ‘bio labs’" - Washington Post
“Here’s How the Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop” - Washington Post
Russia Ramps Up the Crazy with ‘Biolabs’ Presentation Featuring Hunter Biden – Daily Beast
Russia’s bioweapon conspiracy theory finds support in US – Aljazeeera
False Claims of U.S. Biowarfare Labs in Ukraine Grip QAnon – ForeignPolicy
Fox Nation - Who is Hunter Biden?
I decided to watch the documentary film “Who is Hunter Biden?” produced by Fox Nation. I had to watch it twice since I accidentally fell asleep during my first attempt. It’s that bad.
It’s hard to even call it a film. It’s mostly sections from the audio book of Hunter Biden’s memoir “Beautiful Things” mixed in a sections of “Hunter Biden’s Laptop From Hell” read by either the author, Miranda Devine, Judge Jeanine Pirro or a voice actor. The dialog is read over still images, many of them of Hunter Biden’s self-made porn films.
The entire mess is nearly 90 minutes of a depressing material that never really supplies much evidence of any malfeasance by President Joe Biden. Most of what is offered as proof or wrongdoing are one sided text messages and emails sent by Hunter Biden.
A drug addict in search of cash is not exactly the most reliable source to glean information from. Even in the film other family members call out Hunter for his lies and misstatements.
Biden and the Walk Back
This is just one montage of clips of Fox News anchors repeating the exact same phrasing regarding President Joe Biden. As I’ve documented before, the hosts tend to follow some kind of script or talking points. If one person uses a phrase like “walk back” another anchor won’t mix it up with something different like “changed his mind” or “corrected himself”.
The use of repetition is a common tactic used in marketing and propaganda.
Clutch Your Pearls!
Tucker Carlson claims President Joe Biden doesn’t have control over his words and is emotionally unstable. I guess he’s forgetting about former President Donald J. Trump’s many outburst and verbal gaffes.
Stories Fox ignored
The excellent jobs report. - Despite continued high inflation the American economy continues to add more jobs each month. Unemployment is finally at it’s lowest level since the pandemic started at 3.6%. The jobs report was mentioned on Fox News this week but only once. They tried to spin it that the jobs were mostly low income and were slightly below analyst estimates.
Amazon workers formed a union. Workers at a warehouse at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted 55% in favor of being represented by a union. This story was completely ignored on Fox News.
The Emmett Till anti-lynching bill was signed into law - Tucker Carlson was the only person I analyzed last week who mentioned this. Tucker chose to mock the law as being unnecessary in a truly hideous segment. Carlson also didn’t mention that the bill was named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was beaten and shot to death in Mississippi in 1955 after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. It took over 100 years and 200 attempts to get an anti-lynching law passed.
Dubious Expert of the Week
I’m not including a clip this week since the footage wasn’t that compelling.
The two dubious experts of the week were both guests on Tucker Carlson Tonight. The first was the comedian Adam Carolla who Tucker brought on to discuss the NFL’s new rules meant to encourage more minority coaches. I’m not sure why Tucker thought a white male comedian was the best person to discuss minority coaches in a sports league but Carolla gave his two cents anyway.
The second dubious expert Marc Morano, the author of a few books that claim to debunk climate change. Morano has absolutely no training or expertise in climate science.
Morano is a former Republican operative who now runs a website called ClimateDepot which is a product of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a US non-profit that promotes climate change denial.
I didn’t want to take the clip from Tucker’s show and stick it on YouTube as it would just increase the audience for Morano’s pseudoscience.
Carlson’s overwhelming theme for the entire segment was that Democrats are pushing for legislation that would help protect the environment were only doing so to boost their investments in green energy companies.
It didn’t make a ton of sense as anyone could invest in green energy companies and Democrats hardly have a monopoly or exclusive deal with these specific publicly traded companies.
Tucker made these assumptions based off of vague statements by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others promoting reducing consumption of fossil fuels. Tucker also didn’t show proof that the any of the Democrats had received large donations from green energy companies or even that they owned shares in them.
It also never occurred to Carlson that the same argument could be used in reverse towards politicians who have gotten large donations from oil companies. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is just one example of a politician who has voted against climate saving bills while benefiting greatly from the coal industry.
By the Numbers
Will Smith was mentioned thirty times more than Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy. The Five dedicated an entire segment to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for some unknown reason so she showed up 16 times. The Green New Bill tends to come up every week even though it’s never even faced a vote and is not part of President Biden’s policy.
The jobs report was mentioned exactly once in 15 hours.
For next week I’m planning on switching things up to The Ingraham Hour in addition to the first hour of Fox & Friends and The Five.
I learned about your newsletter from my daughter. I am looking forward to reading your newsletter and not having to watch Fox News myself. My mental health will be so much better! Thank you.