The Line From Fox News to Trump’s Big Lie Is Short and Direct
What did Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham say about the Jan. 6 rioting at the United States Capitol — and when did they say it?
Were they suitably censorious of the violence? At the time, did their public remarks match their private horror?
Those questions have been heatedly and extensively hashed outover the days since a House committee released text messages from Jan. 6 in which Hannity and Ingraham, the popular hosts of prime-time shows on Fox News, separately implored President Donald Trump’s chief of staff to get Trump to say and do something to disperse the protesters and quell the violence. Hannity and Ingraham knew that he had stirred those protesters and could sway them, more so than they ever acknowledged on-air, according to their critics. According to Hannity and Ingraham, they’re just the victims — yet again! — of left-wing media smears.
You can delve into the weeds of this or you can pull back and survey the whole ugly yard. And what you see when you do that — what matters most in the end — is that Fox News has helped to sell the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and there’s a direct line from that lie to the rioting. There’s a direct line from that lie to various Republicans’ attempts to develop mechanisms to overturn vote counts should they dislike the results.
That lie is the root of the terrible danger that we’re in, with Trump supporters being encouraged to distrust and undermine the democratic process. And that lie has often found a welcome mat at Fox News.
The Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple is among the many attuned observers who have documented this, and a column of his from mid-January 2021 presented a compendium of inciting commentary on Fox News in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Interviewing Trump on Nov. 29, 2020, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo declared: “We cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted. We cannot.” On Hannity’s show two days later, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro vented an apocalyptic outrage about Joe Biden’s victory, saying: “This fraud will continue and America will be doomed for the next 20 years.” The Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, Hannity himself — all of them got in on the action to some degree, stating or signaling that something about the 2020 election was terribly amiss.
And their evidence? It was fugitive then, and no one has tracked it down since. That’s because it doesn’t exist. It’s a conspiracy-minded, ratings-driven hallucination. Just this week, The Associated Press published a review of “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states” where Trump has disputed Biden’s victory. It found fewer than 475 cases.
“Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president,” the A.P. reported. “The disputed ballots represent just 0.15 percent of his victory margin in those states. The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.”
This mathematical analysis hardly supports the hysteria on the right — a hysteria that Fox News readily whips up. (I direct you to the so-called documentary “Patriot Purge” on Fox Nation, in which Tucker Carlson recasts Jan. 6 as evidence that a corrupt government is setting up and locking up Trump supporters, who are really political prisoners.) And this is no garden-variety partisan hysteria. It circles around and sometimes lands squarely on the contention that Biden is an illegitimate president and Trump is our rightful ruler, exiled to the Siberia of southern Florida.
I know the pushback from the right: It was Democrats who refused to accept Trump’s legitimacy by insisting that he, in cahoots with Russia, cheated his way into the Oval Office. They rushed to judgment as more than a few sympathetic journalists indulged or floated rococo scenarios well beyond anything provable.
But, but, but. Democrats weren’t passing or trying to pass laws in battleground states that would enable them to counter the popular will. Democrats weren’t trying to enshrine rule by the minority. Many Republicans are doing precisely that now.
And they’re being motivated and cheered, both directly and obliquely, by what they see and hear on Fox News. I care less about Hannity’s and Ingraham’s precise words on Jan. 6 than about what they and their colleagues on Fox News said before and after, and what they’re saying now. It’s reckless. It’s subversive. And it’s scary.