\n\n“As the Capitol riot unfolded on January 6, Fox News hosts knew exactly how bad things were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,\u201d Laura Ingraham texted to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. \u201cPlease, get him on TV \u2014 [the riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,\u201d Brian Kilmeade wrote to Meadows. \u201cCan he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?\u201d wrote Sean Hannity in yet another Meadows text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The texts, revealed during a Monday hearing of the House January 6 Commission, were at odds<\/a> with the hosts\u2019 on-air comments on the night of the attack. Ingraham suggested that \u201cantifa supporters\u201d may have been responsible for the violence. Kilmeade took a similar line: \u201cI do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation.\u201d Hannity, for his part, asserted that \u201cthe majority of them were peaceful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is tangible proof that some of Fox\u2019s marquee personalities knowingly lied to their audience about January. The lying began basically immediately, in the direct aftermath of a national tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn\u2019t the only issue on which Fox\u2019s dishonesty has been exposed. On one of the fundamental policy topics of the day, the pandemic, the right\u2019s most influential news network is saying one thing to its audience and doing another in private.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fox News\u2019s programming on vaccines and vaccine mandates has been relentlessly hostile<\/a>. Yet more than 90 percent of Fox News employees are fully vaccinated<\/a>, and the company has a vaccine mandate that\u2019s actually stricter<\/a> than the one President Joe Biden has proposed for large corporations<\/a>. Hosts tend not to mention this on air and, on the rare occasions that they do, they mislead their audience about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are lying to their audience, and anyone paying close attention can see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These incidents speak to a deep pattern in modern conservatism, a parasitic relationship in which a super-wealthy elite preys on the fears of the conservative base for profit.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n