Fox News Tried and Failed to Demonize Ketanji Brown Jackson while Tucker Carlson Promoted Conspiracy Theories and Demonized Ukraine.
A condensed overview of 15 hours of Fox News for week ending 3/27/22
Tucker Carlson promoted a debunked story about Hunter Biden, biolabs and laptops, the cast of “Fox & Friends” acted outraged that Biden was terse with a reporter and the personalities on “The Five” seemed disappointed that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was incredibly poised and professional.
Fox News seemed to lack focus last week as the hosts didn’t seem to know how to handle Judge Jackson’s tremendous calm under pressure during her Supreme Court nomination hearings. They attempted to attack her from every angle but most of their criticism boiled down to her answer to Senator Marsha Blackburn asking her to define the term woman.
For Judge Jackson to answer such a ridiculous question with “I’m not a biologist,” sent the anchors at Fox News into fits of rage.
Their other criticism of Jackson centered on the sentencing that she gave a 18-year-old man for the possession of child pornography. In that particular case the defendant was given a lighter sentence since he was barely an adult when he committed the crime.
The rest of Fox’s coverage was more of the usual tear downs of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Both were blamed for global inflation, the war in Ukraine, and domestic gas prices.
Viewers would be left with the impression that all problems in the world are due to a doddering old President and his dim-witted sidekick of a Vice President.
As usual Fox neglected some huge stories such as the Ginni Thomas Jan. 6th text scandal, and the extended prison sentence for Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny on trumped up charges of fraud.
Tucker Carlson created his own outrage tsunami with his racist screeds against Jackson, tirades against the beleaguered government of Ukraine and his promotion of a QAnon based conspiracy theory that ties Hunter Biden to nonexistent bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson basically took out an entire roll of aluminum foil and fashioned a proverbial tricorne hat with this one.
Clip of the week
Tucker Carlson recycles an old, debunked conspiracy theory involving biolabs in Ukraine that Russia has been trying to promote since 2011. He cited his source as The National Pulse, a publication rated extreme far-right wing and a Questionable Source by mediabiasfactcheck.org. The National Pulse was simply repeating Russian propaganda that Hunter Biden and George Soros were secretly funding bioweapon labs in Ukraine.
The original biolabs story was created by an American QAnon supporter named Jacob who went by the Twitter handle @WarClandestine until his account was suspended.
This story has already spread like wildfire on unregulated social media platforms such as Gab and Telegram and on the nonsense filled media network InfoWars. Russia quickly picked up on the conspiracy theory and amplified it as did personalities on both the far right and far left.
There is some truth to these wild claims as the U.S. has been funding labs to help strengthen public health measures. The program has never been a secret and was set up to help control and study new diseases in both livestock and humans in the region.
After the COVID-19 pandemic it should seem obvious why a wealthier country like the U.S. would want to help stop the spread of a new disease in a country that couldn’t otherwise afford to do it themselves.
The labs are part of an initiative called the Biological Threat Reduction Program which is part of the Defense Threat Reduction campaign which aims to reduce the likelihood of deadly outbreaks, whether natural or man-made.
Both the U.S. and Ukraine signed treaties vowing to never produce or use biological weapons and there’s absolutely no evidence that bioweapons were being manufactured or researched at these facilities.
With all of these fake stories about biological and chemical weapons there is mounting evidence that Russia might be using white phosphorus on the Ukrainian people.
The bridge to connect this wacky theory to Hunter Biden and George Soros came from Russia’s Igor Kirillov, the head of radiation, chemical and biological defense at Russia’s Defense Ministry
The Russian government has even claimed that scientists are creating specific pathogens designed to target Slavic people.
Despite all of the hoopla surrounding Hunter Biden and three abandoned laptops there is still no real evidence to link him to anything nefarious regarding biolabs in Ukraine and very little that could implicate President Joe Biden in any wrongdoing.
The Russians see Hunter Biden as a liability for the Biden administration and are exploiting it, and Tucker Carlson is amplifying their completely fallacious theories.
Sources
How the false Russian biolab story came to circulate among the U.S. far right - NPR
Russia Was Losing the Information War. Then Fox News Stepped in. – Vice
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
U.S. Fight Bioweapons Conspiracy Theory Pushed by Russia and China – New York Times
Analysis: Russia and QAnon have the same false conspiracy theory about Ukraine – CNN
How Russia Sowed a Conspiracy Theory about U.S. Bioweapons in Ukraine – Forbes
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine - primary source government document
It’s OK to be a Bigot to Trans People
In defense of the satire site Babylon Bee’s recent suspension from Twitter for hate speech, Carlson managed to misgender a trans woman eight times in less than two minutes.
Give me your test scores! Some Black people are White!
Carlson also used his airtime to continue to demand the law school entrance exam scores for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson even though he’s never asked to see the LSAT scores of any other recent Supreme Court Justice nominee.
Carlson also appeared to get viscerally angry at the joy expressed by Senator Corey Booker during his statements to Judge Jackson. Carlson accused Booker of being inauthentic and used a trope common in far-right circles to insinuate that both Booker and Jackson weren’t really Black because they were raised in white neighborhoods or by well-educated and successful parents.
It was truly a sick thing to witness as of course Booker and Jackson would still face racism as any Black American would.
In addition to all of that awfulness Carlson also heavily criticized President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for temporarily suspending 11 political parties in his country.
What Tucker left out of course is that the 11 political parties Zelensky temporarily suspended were all tied to Russia, the country that is actively destroying Ukraine.
Dubious Expert of the Week
Candace Owens, conservative political pundit with a high school education took the time to go on Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk about herself. Candace wanted to set the record straight that she was not in fact working for the Russian government. Her proof was a handful of NY Times articles she cited and the fact that she had never traveled to Russia or knew anything about Russian food.
This is despite recent statements she’s made about the country, from the March 15, 2022 edition of The Daily Wire’s Candace via Media Matters.org
CANDACE OWENS (HOST): Wow, "genocidal colonization" is interesting. Again, going back to my point about people being stupid, you know – he's not trying to commit a genocide of the Ukrainians. That obviously makes no sense because there's very – there is no difference, ethnically, between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously. Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians. It was, you know, they speak Russian. So, it's absolutely ridiculous. And, again, this entire episode has been exposing to you how ignorant people are about the goals of Vladimir Putin. He has goals. The goal is not just to get rid of Ukrainians. That makes entirely no sense. It would not be helpful for him.
Clutch Your Pearls! – Biden snapped at the Press
I admit I did cut this clip down a bit to just show the hypocrisy of the Fox & Friends cast as they show outrage and shock at President Joe Biden’s mild rebuke of a few questions he’s asked at a press conference. I then splice in just a handful of dozens of examples where former President Donald J. Trump attacked the press going so far as to call them the enemy of the people.
Tucker Carlson tries to make Hillary Clinton Look Bad, Fails Miserably.
In this clip Tucker Carlson tries to smear Hillary Clinton but her statement is actually quite damning of him. The second quote is from the Polish-American journalist and historian, Anne Applebaum. She isn’t describing Hillary Clinton or any moderate Democrat. Applebaum is basically calling out extreme leftists who often overlap with folks like Carlson himself.
This is How Fox News Smears Democrat policies
I included this clip as a concise example of exactly how Fox News and the GOP manages to spin policies like student loan forgiveness. What Gutfeld says here is incorrect as the demographic most disproportionally affected by student loan debt is Black Americans. He also doesn’t seem to realize that some waitresses and truck drivers might also have student loan debt.
I chose this clip to show how in order to fight back against Fox News spin, one needs to know exactly how they are arguing against it.
Stories that Fox News Completely Ignored
The Ginni Thomas text scandal – The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was sending text messages to then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Thomas promoted conspiracy theories that the election was stolen and urged officials that they shouldn’t accept the results. Her husband did not recuse himself from any cases related to the 2020 election.
Thomas was the only justice to dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision in January to reject Trump’s request to block documents from being released to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
The sham trial involving Russian opposition leader Alexi Navalny which resulted in three additional years being added to his prison sentence. Although the news cycle is dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine a story like this was not deemed newsworthy for Fox to cover.
By the Numbers
Word used on Fox News
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are both equally represented as is trans athlete Lia Thomas. Inexplicibly numerous words are mentioned more than Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There term trans was used more than inflation and Trump was mentioned almost as often as gas.
To end this newsletter on a silly note I give you the man with the worst gas mileage in America. Next week I plan to go repeat Tucker Carlson Tonight since I think he’s really going to expand on the absolutely ridiculous Hunter Biden funded biolabs in Ukraine theory. I was unable to do “Primetime week” due to substitutions on the part of Laura Ingraham but I have plans to try it again in the future.