In the United States, the Fox News channel was pinned by Joe Biden for broadcasting images minimizing the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
This was not at all to President Biden’s taste. In a Tucker Carlson flagship show, Fox News aired footage obtained from Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarty. Images which indeed tended to attenuate the gravity of the invasion of the Capitol by several thousand demonstrators. We know today that there was a lot of violence to enter the parliamentary precinct.
Rioters supporting Trump launched a full-scale assault on the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, surveillance cameras filmed a fanatic attacking the police with a baseball bat, we have even found two homemade bombs near the congress. But according to Fox News, there was only one ” small percentage vandals and the vast majority of people were peaceful. Obviously, this also tends to minimize the responsibility of Donald Trump in this riot. What Biden disputes by speaking of “ hurtful and misleading conclusions about this show. ” More than 140 police officers were injured on January 6 “, he recalled Wednesday.
Deliberate lie
If the president insists on this, it is also because he knows that Fox News deliberately chose to lie by echoing Trump supporters talking about electoral fraud. Two manufacturers of voting machines are claiming billions of dollars from the chain for having defamed them. It is because Rupert Murdoch testified under oath before the Delaware court, at the request of one of these manufacturers, that we know that yes, the magnate suspected that the accusation of stolen election was a lie ; that yes, its presenters had relayed this version well, often moreover without believing in it themselves as their text messages showed. But that, no, he hadn’t done anything to him Murdoch to oppose it.
Calculation, cynicism? Nothing surprising in this 91-year-old tycoon who later found Donald Trump unmanageable. The lie, he knows. All of its newspapers supported the invasion of Iraq based on false evidence of weapons of mass destruction. But he left his star Tucker Carlson, who allowed him to win first place in the news channels, the right to all the excesses: at the Capitol, the presenter mentioned a manipulation of the FBI aimed at passing off patriots as rioters. Last year, he lent his support to Putin by criticizing NATO’s action in Ukraine. For Joe Biden, recalls David Colon, professor at Science Po, Fox News is “ one of the most destructive forces in the United States “.