Fox News Coverage of the January 6th Committee - Day 8
Fox News Coverage of the January 6th Committee - Day 8
A condensed overview of Fox Business coverage of the hearings as well as Fox News Primetime 7/21/22
A typical Fox News viewer might falsely believe that the audience for the January 6th Committee hearings has been small and that no new information has been revealed in the series. If a Fox News fan watched the primetime coverage that Fox showed instead of the hearing they’d get a mixed bag of conspiracy theories about COVID-19, old nonsense focused on Bill Gates, and Sean Hannity’s continued baseless spin that the riots were caused by Democratic leadership, not former President Donald J. Trump.
For this newsletter I focused on the hearing itself, commentary by both Fox News and PBS as well as the three hours of primetime programs that Fox aired instead of the hearing. I captured, watched and analyzed over six hours of media.
Fox Business broadcast the hearings along with commentary by several Fox News personalities.
I realize that most Fox viewers would not watch both the primetime programming and the hearing but I thought it was best to cover both as it would be interesting to see how both Fox News and Fox Business spun the event.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol - Day 8
Fox News references included as evidence
Duration of Hearing - 2 hours and 30 minutes
Duration of Commentary: 20 minutes
Pre-hearing - 2 minutes
Recess - 13 minutes 30 seconds
Post -hearing - 4 minutes 30 seconds
References to Fox News
Witness Sarah Matthews mentioned her strong relationship with Kayleigh McEnany, Fox News host
Trump was watching Fox News as soon as he got back to the White House after the riot started. Trump sat in the dining room with Fox on the television for more than two and a half hours.
Kayleigh McEnany testified that Trump was calling Senators encouraging them to block the certification of the electors.
Text messages from Fox News anchors to high ranking White House advisors - Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity were used as evidence.
Kayleigh McEnany also encouraged the POTUS to call off the violent mob.
A clip from Fox News of a Fox host speaking directly to Kevin McCarthy in real time during the riot asking him what strategies he was using to help calm the situation.
Panel
Bret Baier - Fox News
Martha MacCallum - Fox News
Jonathan Turley - Fox News legal analyst
Chad Pergram - Fox News
Jessica Tarlov - Fox News - liberal opinion on “The Five”
Harold Ford Jr. - Fox News - moderate opinion on “The Five”
Trey Gowdy - Former U.S. Representative - (R-SC)
It was a bit bold for Fox Business to include a liberal and a moderate on the panel. I was disappointed that Fox News legal analyst, Andy McCarthy, was not part of the discussion since he’s said some fairly outrageous things in the past about the House investigation.
Right at the start of the commentary during the recess there was some acknowledgement by MacCallum that, according to the testimony of several witnesses, Donald J. Trump made no attempt to call the National Guard, Department of Defense, Capitol Police, or any other form of security to quell the riot.
“Did the President ever call the Secretary of Defense? Did he call the head of DHS? Did he call the National Guard? Did he call the Capitol Police? And the answer from those individuals, from their own knowledge of being in the White House was that that did not happen,” said MacCallum
MacCallum and Baier also discussed how concerned Vice Pres. Mike Pence and his security detail was during the ordeal.
Baier repeated a post that has been brought up countless times across the Fox News media ecosystem since the investigation started.
“One thing critics will say about this committee hearing is every time they show the clip from the rally on the mall, and they ever whenever they take a clip for on President Trump, they always leave out that ending clip of let's march peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol. I mean, if you're at this point, we've seen this tape so many times, why not just play it,” said Baier
Fox is really putting a tremendous amount of weight on one line in a speech, despite the much more heightened language Trump used in the rest of his address to the crowd and the multiple tweets he sent out after the riot had already started that heightened the anger of the protesters.
Fox News Congressional correspondent, Chad Pergram, summarized Chairman Thompson’s view of what happened,
“The former president made targets out of his own vice president and lawmakers who do the people's work here at the United States Capitol,” said Pengram
From here onward the panel just downplayed all of the evidence and testimony that was present with Turley calling it “Impeachment 3.0.”
This is another criticism that Fox News has lobbied against the Committee. Even though the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump started one week after the riot, multiple Fox personalities have argued the Senate should have tied Trump for dereliction of duty rather than incitement of insurrection.
Fox News is basically pretending that the impeachment process would have yielded in a conviction if only the Democrats had provided a better case against the president.
One of the moderate voices on the panel, Ford, also remarked that Trump made no effort to call in any security to end the violence.
Gowdy offered nothing more but criticism of how the panel handled the evidence.
Tarlov had the best insight as she emphasized that this crisis is ongoing as Trump continues to promote “The Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. She also noted that nearly all of the witnesses who have testified have been diehard Republicans who were once enthusiastic supporters of the president.
Baier had to make a slight dig towards Rep. Cheney by commenting that she’ll probably lose her re-election.
After the hearing Fox Business continued the discussion for four and a half minutes.
Absolutely nothing new was brought up. Gowdy repeated the same tired argument that all of this should have been brought up in the 2nd impeachment. Turley continued to minimize the evidence and testimony.
Fox might be starting to turn away from their blind defense of the former president. Although their commentary of the last hearing was tepid they did include two opposing opinions.
The midterm elections will probably be the biggest indication if Fox News throws more of its focus towards someone like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Fox and other right-wing media have been hyping DeSantis for months. Ingraham even aired a special episode of “The Ingraham Angle” on Friday from Florida that featured the governor.
If Fox News doesn’t think Trump is worth betting on they will drop him like a hot rock. The network does not seem concerned about this hearing or any criminal investigation into Trump or his entourage. If Republican voters sour on Trump, Fox would have no reservations about shoving a flag pole for DeSantis directly into the proverbial corpse of the MAGA movement.
A condensed edit of how Fox News covered Jan. 6th Committee Day 8
PBS Coverage
Duration of Commentary: 28 minutes 30 seconds
Recess - 17 minutes 30 seconds
Post -hearing - 11 minutes
Panel
Judy Woodruff - PBS
Lisa Desjardins - PBS
Mary McCord - Former Justice Department official under Pres. Obama, currently Director of the Institute of Constitutional Advocacy and Protection
Jamil Jaffer - Former assoc. counsel to President George W. Bush, currently law professor at George Mason University
Evy Poumpouras - Former Secret Service agent.
PBS had a completely different tone towards the hearing. Woodruff stared out,
“I've been sitting here, just reacting catching our breath, said Woodruff. “As we listen to the description of Secret Service agents, protecting vice president, then Vice President Pence, who were worried about whether they were going to survive.”
Both McCord and Jaffer immediately pointed out that Trump purposefully sat in his dining room while the riot raged on in the hopes that the rioters would delay the process of certifying electors.
Former Secret Service agent, Poumpouras, pointed out at length the difficulty the agents had at dealing with a civilian threat. Her insight definitely added a layer to what happened with Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer. In her opinion as dire as the situation became the agents wanted to avoid killing or harming a civilian.
McCord seemed to answer a criticism Fox News has repeated since the start of this process,
“I heard just even on my way to the studio tonight saying, well, it's so one sided, but let's not forget, you know, the proposal originally was a for an independent commission proposal has been for bipartisan and so to now criticize that this is one sided, and I would say I think it's quite balanced. But to say it's one sided is really just for you know, revisionist history about how we came to this to this spot,” said McCord.
Fox News played such a large role in this hearing PBS even brought up the network more than once in their coverage of the event.
“The strong impression tonight was that even the people closest to him in the White House, his own daughter, his children, his closest advisors, his fans at Fox News, are all telling him to call off this mob,” said Woodruff.
Woodruff also mentioned how the Committee seemed to focus narrowly on Trump. They weren’t placing the blame on his advisors or staff but the Nero-like figure who sat in the dining room while the Capitol was under siege.
Jamil Jaffer, who worked for a Republican administration himself, pointed out that all of the witnesses were at one time ardent supporters of the President but had become disillusioned by his actions on the day of the riot. They were so disgusted that they resigned on the spot.
I think what you saw representative Cheney and represent Kissinger, from the Republican side lay out the case for is this was a president who not only was engaged in dereliction of duty, but also may be unfit to serve.
*Because the coverage was quite unbalanced in duration this time I won’t be comparing word usage between the two networks. PBS had a considerably longer commentary section during the recess so it would be quite difficult to accurately compare it to Fox’s much shorter segment.
Fox News Primetime lineup
Tucker Carlson Tonight
Tucker Carlson’s approach to the January 6th Committee hearing was to largely ignore it. Carlson had one short reference to the hearing and spent half of his airtime promoting yet another conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 virus.
“The TV Control Room, there's a huge bank of monitors and every single one of them it shows everything that's on TV. And one of our producers just said that an every other channel. They're playing some kind of January 6 Hearing January 6, because that's the biggest thing going on in America right now. No, why are they doing that? No one wants to watch it. You know what happened on January 6, some guy in Viking horns wandered around on mushrooms and made weird noises and it was kind of it was an insurrection, which certainly instructions had guns, but it makes the people covering and feel like they live through Vietnam. More lifestyle, liberal narcissism, that's really the key to everything.”
Hannity
Hannity started his program with the same widely debunked conspiracy theory he’s pushed about January 6th that places the blame on Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Rep. Jim Banks also discussed the hearing as it was being broadcast simultaneously as his appearance on Hannity.
It was downright humorous that Hannity kept talking about the hearing as there was no way he could watch it while broadcasting his own show. He might have seen the first hour as it aired during Tucker Carlson Tonight, but he kept making references about specifics he would have no way of knowing.
Ultimately Hannity came across as a bit desperate with his same tired theories about the riots that he’s been pushing for over a year. One google search by anyone skeptical of his account would lead to source after source that debunk all of his claims.
He also shifted focus as he kept brining up the riots in the summer in 2020. Hannity often brings up these riots as a means to smear Democrats but always leaves out that Donald J. Trump was an incredibly polarizing and unpopular president at the time.
Hannity could be concerned about the investigation since he seemingly had the closest relationship to former President Trump than his colleagues at Fox News. Although there’s no evidence that Hannity encouraged the rioting or violence it’s unclear what he knew before or after the event.
The Ingraham Angle
Laura Ingraham took the same approach as Tucker Carlson and largely ignored the hearings. Her program was primarily focused on Pres. Joe Biden’s COVID-19 diagnoses, a long lament about the failures of the European Union and an old debunked conspiracy theory that involved Bill Gates and farmland.
“I don't want to give the January 6 committee, much attention at all. But Nicole Wallace had a pressing question today in the lead up to it all,” said Ingraham as she showed a clip of an exchange between Nicole Wallace and Ron Klain from MSNBC.
(MSNBC clip)
“When I had COVID I binge Lucifer, President Biden has something else he could watch on television tonight,” said Wallace. “That's the primetime hearing at the January 6 committee. Do we know if he plans to watch that?”
“I don't know Nicole, how much he will watch. He has been watching the hearings when he gets a chance,” said Klain
Ingraham chuckled a bit,
“Now, first of all, who thinks Biden is still up, number one,”said Ingraham. “Number two, why is Ron Klain still employed at the White House with his track record?”
Coming up…
The next weekly newsletter/podcast will be published on Monday evening. I’m going to cover everything but the January 6th Committee Hearings from last week. For this upcoming week I’ll be returning to my regular schedule of the first hour of “Fox & Friends”, “The Five” and since I haven’t covered her in a while “The Ingraham Angle.” with Laura Ingraham.
Depending on time I might also do a compilation of how Fox covered the entire series of hearings just to see how often they repeated the same points.