Tag: Capitol Insurrection

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Fox News January 6 Media in America

The Ratings Are In: 20 Million Watched The Jan. 6 Hearing – Only 3 Million Watched Fox

Based on the numbers from the first televised hearing of the January 6 House Select Committee, it appears that Fox News dropped the ball in a big way and got destroyed in the ratings.

According to the New York Times, at least 20 million viewers tuned in to watch the hearings. Only 3 million opted for Fox, which deliberately avoided televising the historic event:

An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.

ABC attracted the biggest audience, with 5.2 million viewers. NBC and CBS each had an audience of more than three million. MSNBC averaged more than four million, and CNN drew 2.7 million. (The 20 million figure did not yet include PBS, so the total audience was most likely a bit bigger.)

MSNBC did especially well compared to Fox:

MSNBC averaged a whopping (for them) 4.161 million total viewers, trouncing both Fox News (2.957 million total viewers) by 29 percent and CNN (2.617 total million viewers) by 37 percent. CNN finished way ahead of its direct cable news competition in the key demographic for news programming, adults 25-54, with 709,000 viewers from that age range vs. 555,000 on MSNBC and 513,000 on Fox. That’s a 22 percent advantage over MSNBC and 28 percent win over Fox News.

The three Fox hosts who provided anti-coverage and criticism of the hearings — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — saw their numbers crater, which is bad news for the conservative network with more public hearings on the way in the weeks ahead.

Once again, Fox would rather lose tens of millions of viewers than air the truth. It’s one of many reasons they should remove the word “news” from their propaganda network.

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Congress Fox News January 6

Tucker Carlson Pitched An On-Air Hissy Fit During Thursday’s Jan. 6 Committee Hearing

Fox News host Tucker Carlson proved once again Thursday evening that he and the network he works for have zero credibility and are nothing more than a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and its would-be dictator for life, Donald Trump.

As the first evening of hearings from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol were beginning at 8:00 p.m., Carlson was starting his nightly show, and he made it clear from the get-go that he had no intention of letting any truth into his broadcast:

“This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live.

“They are lying, and we will not let them do it.”

HuffPost notes it wasn’t just Carlson’s ranting that was completely fact-free and at times hysterical:

He and his producers plastered hysterical chyrons across the screen for their millions of viewers to see: “JAN 6 CMTE FUELS FALSE NARRATIVES AS SHAM INVESTIGATION DRAGS ON.” “LEADERS WILL SPEND 90 MINUTES GIVING MORAL LECTURE.” “OUR LEADERS ARE FOCUSING ON JAN. 6 WHILE IGNORING THE REAL THREATS.”

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Carlson also suggested that investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection might just led to another insurrection, which is ironic since he insisted there had been no insurrection in the first place:

“This was not an insurrection, but you know what will give you an insurrection? If you ignore legitimate concerns of a population. If you brush them aside like they don’t matter when gas goes to $5 and say ‘Buy an electric car.’ When cities become so filthy and dangerous that you can’t live there. When the economy becomes so distorted your children have no hope of getting married and giving you grandchildren. When you don’t care at all about any of that and all you do is talk about yourself, nonstop, you might get an insurrection if you behave like that, speaking of insurrections.”

Is that right, Tuck? Well, at least the FBI will know who to visit if and when that happens.

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Capitol Insurrection Fox News January 6

Hillary Shreds Fox For Refusing To Air Jan. 6 Hearings: ‘They Prefer Their Sedition Made Fresh On-Site’

Just hours after Fox News announced they would refuse to cover any of the televised public hearings from the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone viral with a tweet she sent out suggesting that the network is actively engaged in sedition.

For those unfamiliar with exactly what the word sedition means, here’s a definition:

“Incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”

 

According to the New York Times, Fox’s decision to ignore the hearings clearly makes them an outlier:

“(Fox) anchors have held a dim view of the committee. Mr. Carlson called the committee ‘grotesque’ on his program on Monday night, and Mr. Hannity has called the group of five Democrats and two Republicans ‘fake’ on his 9 p.m. show.”

Sounds like classic psychological projection on the part of the Fox hosts, doesn’t it?

The move by the right-wing “news” network prompted Clinton to eviscerate them on Twitter, with a posting that quickly went viral:

Others then joined the debate and also pilloried Fox.

Keep in mind that Fox (and it’s prime time hosts) had absolutely no compunction about repeating lies about how the 2020 presidential election had been “stolen” from Donald Trump, even going to far as to suggest that voting machines had been manipulated to guarantee that Joe Biden was the victor.

Fox has backed off the election conspiracy theories since a massive $2.7 billion lawsuit was filed by Smartmatic, an election technology company which claims it was defamed by the lies told on the network. A judge ruled in March that the lawsuit will move forward, despite Fox’s asking for it be dismissed, according to Vanity Fair:

A New York judge said much of Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation case against the network can proceed. There is “substantial basis” for the claim “that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about [Smartmatic], unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Judge David Cohen wrote in a 61-page ruling.

Sedition and defamation. Sounds like that’s what Fox needs to have as part of their on-screen graphics. It’d be the first time they’ve ever told the truth about anything.

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Capitol Insurrection January 6

Meet The Former Trump Aide Some Are Calling ‘The Next John Dean’ For The January 6 Hearings

When the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 begins their public hearings next Thursday evening, June 9, one of the names you’ll probably hear quite often is Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Hutchinson is being billed as “the next John Dean,” a reference to the former Nixon administration White House counsel who blew the whistle on Watergate and the cover-up that eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 4, 1974.

Dean, you may recall, famously told the Watergate committee that he had informed Nixon:

“I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed the president himself would be killed by it.”

What Cassidy Hutchinson knows could well prove to be just as explosive as what Dean said nearly 50 years ago, the Washington Post reports:

Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, has sat for multiple depositions with investigators — more than 20 hours — and is expected to play a starring role in the hearings, according to people familiar with the matter. Hutchinson, people familiar with the committee said, has provided extensive information about Meadows’s activities in trying to overturn the election.

Meadows, through his lawyer, declined to provide comment.

The Washington Post reported late last month that Hutchinson had told the committee that Meadows remarked to others that Trump indicated support for hanging his vice president after rioters who stormed the Capitol on that day started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

How important is Hutchinson’s testimony? So much so that Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also served as counsel to House Democrats for Trump’s first impeachment trial, notes:

“Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean.”

Hutchinson also took extensive notes of what happened inside the White House on the day the Capitol was stormed by thousands of pro-Trump supporters, and those documents could prove incredibly damaging to Meadows and Trump, both of whom are facing indictment by the Justice Department for their role in Jan. 6:

Hutchinson has recalled for the committee various episodes in the chaotic scramble to sustain Trump’s election-fraud falsehood.A former mid-level aide,she kept detailed schedules of movements in the West Wingand had extensive conversations with Meadows.

Court filings show Hutchinson detailinga meeting in the lead-up to Jan. 6 between Meadows and House Republican lawmakers in which they discussed delaying the Joint Session of Congress — or altogether preventing the counting of electoral votes — so that state legislatures could select different electors.

The Jan. 6 committee will hold six public hearings, with the first and last ones being in primetime, which is certain to make for riveting television and sleepless nights for the Donald and many of his former advisers.

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Capitol Insurrection Donald Trump January 6 Mike Pence The Trump Adminstration

Trump Complained About Pence Being Taken To Safety On 1/6 – Said VP Should Be Hung: Report

As rioters were storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump saw crowds of people chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and said he agreed with them, getting upset when it became clear that the vice president had been whisked to safety by the U.S. Secret Service.

According to The New York Times:

Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.

Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hung.

It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.

Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone who actually knows what the failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president is capable of.

For example, Trump reportedly made fun of his own father, Fred Trump, as he faded into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, as first reported back in 2017 in the book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump, the ex-president’s niece:

“Among the family drama that Trump is set to spill in the book is how the current US president ‘dismissed and derided’ his father ‘when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s,’ which he was diagnosed with in 1993, according to Simon & Schuster.”

Donald Trump is a complete asshole. He always has been, even as a child:

Dennis Burnham was four years younger and lived around the corner from Donald. He inherited his own impression of his neighbor from his mother, who warned that he should “stay away from the Trumps.”

“Donald was known to be a bully, I was a little kid, and my parents didn’t want me beaten up,” said Burnham, 65, a business consultant in Texas.

Once when she left Dennis in a playpen in a back yard adjoining the Trumps’ property, Martha Burnham returned to find Donald throwing rocks at her son. “She saw Donald standing at the fence,” Dennis Burnham said, “using the playpen for target ­practice.”

Should it surprise anyone that Donald was willing to see his own VP hang from a scaffold if it would allow him to remain as president indefinitely? If it does, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.