Fox News Coverage of the January 6th Committee - Day 9
An overview of how Fox News covered the last installment of the January 6th Committee Hearing and how it compared to a non-partisan network.
Fox News put its usual spin on the final installment of the the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. As far as the right-wing network was concerned the riot was more of a protest, no one was really in danger, the president was barely involved and American voters don’t really care about it either way.
The hearing was presented as political theater meant to distract voters from rising inflation, gas prices, and general economic insecurity. Fox has been consistent in their complete avoidance of any of the damning evidence presented against former President Donald J. Trump.
The network has still never acknowledged that the 2020 election was legitimate. Overall Fox News has approached the January 6th Committee hearings reluctantly like a spoiled teenager with a burdensome homework assignment. They cover it but they don’t love it.
Fox News acknowledges the riot happened but they’ve downplayed the severity of the violence and destruction. To Fox News the attempted insurrection was some angry people who got a little out of hand.
During the past nine installments no one at Fox ever acknowledged that multiple Fox personalities tried to reach out to Trump during the riot, or that their favorite would be despot was watching Fox News while rioters bashed in windows and smeared human feces on the walls.
Their message to viewers is,
“There’s nothing to see here.”
As I always I compared the commentary on Fox News to a nonpartisan media source - The PBS NewsHour.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol - Day 9
Fox News references included as evidence Day 9
Kayleigh McEnany testimony - although she was the White House Press Secretary at the time she now works as an anchor for Fox News.
A reference to text messages sent by Fox anchors, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to the Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging then President Donald J. Trump to call off the mob.
“Can he make a statement. I saw the tweet. Ask people to peacefully leave the capital,” Hannity, text message.
“Hey Mark, The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham, text message.
Screenshot from the January 6th Hearings.
Fox News - Commentary
Duration of Hearing: 2 hours 12 minutes
Duration of Commentary: 38 minutes
Recess - 16 minutes
Post -hearing - 22 minutes
Fox News Panel
Sandra Smith - Fox News
Trace Gallagher - Fox News
Martha MacCallum - Fox News
Chad Pergram - Fox News
David Spunt - Fox News
Marc Thiessen - The Washington Post, former speech writer for President George W. Bush
Byron York - Washington Examiner
Andy McCarthy - Fox News legal analyst
Jonathan Turley - Fox News legal analyst
Overall the Fox personalities kept trying to pull focus away from Trump as if the riot would have happened anyway and Trump just happened to be president at the time. There were also multiple references to the theatrical nature of the event as if the presentation wasn’t of substance because it was too polished and slick.
Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy offered a muddled explanation of why it would be difficult to charge former President Donald J. Trump with a crime.
“According to the committee. We heard it from Liz Cheney at the beginning and Adam Schiff at the end. Trump is the center of everything. He's the be all and end all of the conspiracy. If you go down to where they're trying the case against the Oath Keepers, Donald Trump is not the center of the storm. He's a passing cloud. He's a tangential figure. Their theory at in the courthouse is that the Oath Keepers were planning to make war against the United States, use force against the government, which is what the seditious conspiracy charges and that Donald Trump was just a pretext for them to do what they were planning to do anyway,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy is a lawyer so it should be obvious to him that a case against a group or individual attacking the Capitol would be quite different from how a prosecutor might form a case against Trump, the person who may have encouraged others to use violence.
McCarthy continued.
“And the reason for that is clear to say that you're making war against the United States. It would be very difficult in my case, for example, it was very clear that we were dealing with jihadist foreign jihadists, enemies of the United States. There was no ambiguity about who the good guys were and the bad guys were, who the alternative sides were here. Here what the Oath Keepers want to say is that they thought they were being called out not to make war against the government, but called out by the head of the government, the chief executive, to save the government, not to make war on it,” said McCarthy.
The lack of opposing voices in the investigation has been one criticism that’s been repeated on Fox News since the first hearing. This critique is a bit hollow as Democrats originally sought an independent commission to investigate the riot, similar to the 9-11 commission, but that idea was shot down by Senate Republicans.
Minority leader Kevin McCarthy also pulled all five of his nominees for the committee after Speaker Pelosi rejected both Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Jim Banks. Both Banks and Jordan are strong allies of former President Donald J. Trump and both had objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election in the House on January 6.
Of course no one on Fox reminded their viewers that attempts were made to create a more bi-partisan investigation.
They were also extremely worked up about how both committee members Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) would be leaving congress at the end of this term. The Fox personalities were also outraged that this final meeting was being held 26 days before an election.
Just as in past committee hearings the Fox News journalists and legal analysts didn’t focus on the evidence at hand. They also downplayed how it was Speaker Pelosi and Vice Pres. Mike Pence who took steps to call the National Guard for additional security at the Capitol.
They also briefly discussed Roger Stone’s involvement with both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers but acted as if Stone was not closely tied with Trump himself.
Martha MacCallum just reinvented reality.
“Although they have said that President Trump was at the center of this from the very beginning, is directly tie him to the break in and the riot at the Capitol. And I think they have been trying to lay out everything they can with 26 days to the election. They know this is their last gasp, as I said, and they're hoping that it will have an impact. I think if they'd had the courage to do this in a more fulsome way, it might have had a stronger impact,” said MacCallum
I have no idea what MacCallum is talking about here. At this point dozens of mostly Republican witnesses have testified that Trump was extremely connected to this riot.
Marc Thiessen was basically angry that the evidence and images presented by the committee were so effective.
“Yeah. So like everybody on this panel, I was appalled by what happened on January six. I spent seven years working up in the Senate. It was a privilege to walk out on the Senate floor. And every time I see video like what we saw today, my blood boils. But then as I watched that video today, I had this distinct feeling that I was beat, my emotions were being manipulated, that I was I was being I was being churned up to get angry about this all over again,” said Thiesseen.
Fox also spent quite a bit of time exploring the different ways Trump could be indicted then went into a summary about the hundreds of rioters who have been arrested since the attack.
MacCallum and her cohorts reduced their crimes to simple trespassing, as if the footage of men in riot gear beating police officers, smashing windows while screaming, “Hang Mike Pence,” had not just been part of the broadcast they were supposed to be discussing.
Most Fox News viewers would have little interest in the technical aspects of how the Department of Justice might charge Trump. They even trotted out an obscure rule where they claimed Congress itself could prosecute Trump.
It felt a bit like a stall tactic. It was easier to talk about arcane Congressional rules than Trump supporters tearing apart the Capitol.
Marc Thiessen reminded viewers that none of this insurrectionist talk was even remotely relevant.
“And we just found out today that grocery prices went up 18%. Gasoline prices have gone up 59%. Natural gas prices are up 52%. Electricity is up 23%. New cars are up 17%. Use cars up 36%. Furniture up 22%. Clothes are up 10% is the worst inflation for decades. We've got the worst crime wave since the 1990s. We've got the worst border crisis in American history.
And most Americans look at this and say, I don't care right now about Donald Trump. I care about what's happening in my life. I'm care about the fact that I have to choose between gas and food, that I that that I have to choose between paying my rent and heating my home this winter,” said Thiessen.
He is correct. Plenty of viewers don’t care about what happened on January 6 and have very different concerns about the country right now.
At the same time there are millions of Americans who are a deeply worried about the state of our democracy and don’t want Trump to ever get close to power again. Overthrowing a government by violent insurrection is kind of a big deal. This attempt was half-baked but the next one could be successful.
The panel at Fox also seemed strangely fixated on two things - the fact that the hearing was technically now a meeting, and the decision to subpoena Trump at the end of the process.
This is a condensed edit of the entire commentary.
Hannity - Night of Hearing 10/13/22
Sean Hannity included a brief two and a half minute segment about the January 6th Committee meeting. Hannity just promoted his widely debunked conspiracy theory that Speaker Pelosi and the Mayor of Washington D.C. were the reason the Capitol was not better protected on January 6, 2021.
Later in his program Hannity also brought up the Jan. 6th Committee but during a segment about inflation but his guests steered the discussion back to the economy.
It’s especially outrageous that Hannity continues to promote this completely false narrative especially since the Committee featured footage of Pelosi calling multiple governors for help while in a secured location at the Capitol.
Commentary PBS NewsHour
Duration of Commentary: 39 minutes
Recess - 16 minutes
Post -hearing - 23 minutes
Panel
Amna Navas - 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
PBS invited Mary McCord and Jamil Jaffer to help breakdown the hearing. Both McCord and Jaffer have appeared on the NewsHour to discuss previous January 6th hearings.
PBS included experts from both sides of the political spectrum.
While Fox seemed more concerned a hearing being renamed a business meeting the legal experts at PBS dove head first into the evidence presented.
“Is the totality evidence that we've now seen sort of summarize today. The president knew he had lost. He didn't care. The president's people knew he lost. They didn't care. To the contrary, they to undertake every effort to reverse results of elections, knowing they'd lost the election. And then when that failed in the courts decide to go to the American people and their supporters and to gin up an event on January six that ultimately led to the violence we saw.
The president knew what they were doing, didn't act to stop it. And the reason that stop was not because he didn't understand what's happening. It's because he wanted it to happen,” said Jaffer.
Most of the commentary on PBS NewsHour was in reference to the video evidence and testimony of various witnesses.
The panel did discuss how the public might react towards the decision to subpoena former President Trump. Jaffer saw it as a political mistake whereas Lisa Desjardins commented that prosecutors often wait to subpoena their true target at the very end of an investigation.
“I think a lot of prosecutors might say, you know, the last one to get the subpoena is the target,” said Desjardins.
Mary McCord was concerned about how much damage the attack and its aftermath had on our electoral system.
“We're now seeing election intimidation. We're seeing calls for tailgate parties at ballot drop boxes to intimidate voters. We've seen intimidating signage near ballot drop boxes. We're seeing election deniers running for offices and to the point of things held the last time, because at the local, state, federal level, people did their jobs. We have more. We have well over a hundred election deniers running for secretaries of state, governors, people who are in positions, who will have authority over elections, have authority to certify or not certify,” said McCord.
This is a chart of words used at both networks during the commentary of Day 9 of the January 6th Committee.
This is by far the most dramatic comparison I’ve ever seen when comparing the two networks. Fox did not mention Vice President Pence once. I went through the transcript and triple checked to see if his name was somehow misspelled as transcription services can make mistakes. They didn’t use Pence or his title of Vice President once.
PBS also used the words violence and violent far more offend than Fox while Fox repeated the terms theater and theatrical a total of eight times.
Coming up…
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Great work you provide. I'm a former Nuclear weapons inspector.
I first heard your interview on SIRI XM 127. A must follow! 10 years of Nuclear power and weapons work. With a Q Clearance! I am deeply concerned as to who got to see those documents. Take pictures etc.