Keep this in mind about those hypocrites at Fox News who sent their frantic text messages to the White House during the U.S Capitol rioting last Jan. 6: we now have proof that these “journalists” would sooner sell out their own country than tell their audience the truth.
When the mob was storming the Capitol, why didn’t Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and the others at Fox just go on their very own airwaves, while we still had a functioning republic, and tell Donald Trump to call off his rioters — instead of sending private text messages to the president’s chief of staff?
Trump would have seen them.
Everybody knows he watches TV all the time.
And everybody knows his favorite TV station is Fox.
But those hypocrites at Fox – the ones who have lived in Trump’s back pocket for the past five years – couldn’t do that for a very simple reason.
To say in public what they were texting in private would be to announce their ongoing conflicts of interest, and blow the lid off the lies they’ve been broadcasting for five years on behalf of the disgraced Trump.
What’s more important, ratings or the republic?
What’s more important, big money or simple truth?
Their words last Jan. 6 gave us the answers.
Not that there was much doubt about it before this, but the revelations that spilled out of Rep. Liz Cheney’s congressional testimony last week gave us the evidence.
When the rioters were doing their damnedest to tear down the government, the Fox network stars were pleading with Trump – privately, of course, through their text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows – to call off the insurrection.
“Mark,” Ingraham texted, “the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us.”
“Us,” see?
We’re in this con together.
“He is destroying his legacy,” Ingraham added, to give her text a hint of selflessness.
Then, she and the others went on the air that night – and ever since – and dismissed all of the madness. The rioters were “patriots,” they were no different than “tourists,” they might have been misled by leftists who were planted in their ranks.
Oh, please.
This kind of “reporting” is just an extension of Fox’s actions throughout the Trump presidency, where there’s been a direct back-and-forth between the words uttered by the cable station’s evening stars and Trump’s own words.
He declares voter fraud, and Fox echoes him. He says Joe Biden’s not the legitimate president, and Fox echoes him.
And never mind last week’s Associated Press review of “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states” where Trump disputed Biden’s victories.
The AP found 475 cases – or 0.15 percent – out of 25.5 million votes cast in those six states.
There was no voter fraud that would have changed the election.
But there’s massive, shameful, ongoing fraud out of those Fox voices trying to tell us otherwise.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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