On Monday night, Tucker Carlson brought his Fox News viewers the kind of story you’d probably call “big, if true.”
The news pertained to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the interesting part was that, according to Carlson, it had hardly been an insurrection at all. Using snippets of U.S. Capitol security camera footage his show had obtained from Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Carlson presented scenes of election protesters wandering calmly around the building, in some cases interacting peacefully with police officers. What a fun field trip! The takeaway, according to the host, was that while “the protesters were angry” because they “believed that the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted, and they were right,” the persistent narrative of Jan. 6 insurrectionist violence is nothing more than a dirty liberal lie—one that has been used as “a pretext for a federal crackdown on opponents of the uniparty in Washington.”
Carlson’s imaginative gloss on Jan. 6 elicited much scorn from reality-based pundits and politicians, including several Republican senators who were present in the Capitol that day and did not much appreciate being gaslit by someone who wasn’t. But it shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise. Carlson has spent much of the past two years attempting to downplay the Capitol riot, sneering at those people who justifiably claim that the incursion was one of the darkest days in modern American history. So it goes. Without the grievance-flogging and fact-evading tactics he embraced at the beginning of the Trump era, Carlson would still be co-hosting Fox & Friends Weekend. The prime-time star understands the secret to his late-career resurgence, and there is nothing at all unusual about him playing the tunes that have made him famous.
What is unusual is the fact that few others on the network have picked up the melody. As Colby Hall wrote at Mediaite, Carlson’s report was initially met with silence from the other hosts and programs on Fox News—perhaps because they are treading cautiously due to the ongoing lawsuit against the channel by Dominion Voting Systems, or perhaps because Carlson’s conclusions here are indefensible even by the network’s own low standards. When Special Report With Bret Baier finally addressed the Jan. 6 story head-on the next day, it did so skeptically, with correspondent Chad Pergram emphasizing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s outright rejection of Carlson’s narrative, and noting that Jan. 6 defendants “assaulted 140 police officers, some so badly they’ll never return to work.”
Fox News is generally pretty good at keeping its news hosts on message. If there’s a theme or a storyline that the network wants to advance, no matter how objectively stupid it may be—fearsome migrant caravans approaching our southern border; transgender college athletes leading America into turpitudinous doom; Donald Trump being a good man and a great president—you can generally count on that theme recurring every hour on the network until it starts to seem like cold fact. As former Fox host Megyn Kelly noted in a recent episode of her podcast, “I worked at Fox for many years, so if somebody gets a big, big scoop, you know, you ride it, you ride the wave, you blanket the channel with it.”
That Carlson obtained previously unseen footage of an important news event certainly counts as a scoop. But it’s a Twitter Files–style scoop, meant less to illuminate than to obscure. McCarthy, who effectively serves at his far-right members’ pleasure these days, did not give the videos to Carlson because he expected him to treat them with rigorous journalistic scrutiny. He expected that Carlson would cherry-pick certain parts and mischaracterize others in order to discredit the Jan. 6 committee while owning the libs.
Fox News is not usually reluctant to own the libs, so good on the network for not wholeheartedly riding this particular wave. On the other hand, it’s pathetic that it seems notable Fox News isn’t gratuitously amplifying a ridiculous lie. The network’s circumspection is the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that Fox News is less a news organization than a de facto PAC wearing a reporter’s costume it picked up from Halloween Adventure.
For all intents and purposes, and as I have written approximately 7,000 times before, Fox News functions as an arm of the Republican Party, with its goal being to support conservative politicians and policy priorities. The network gives its conservative viewers what they want, more or less, but it also attempts to tell them what they should want, be it getting drag queens out of libraries or electing Ron DeSantis as president. While every news outlet—left, right, and center—focuses on certain stories to the exclusion of others, Fox News is uniquely gifted at manufacturing stories out of anecdotes and mischaracterizations. These stories inevitably lionize the right while discrediting the left.
Although there are certainly a bunch of actual journalists who work at Fox News, their role is, in the end, diversionary. Some of the anchors and correspondents at Fox do consistently solid and sometimes excellent work; that work camouflages the partisan dreck that proliferates on the network, allowing it too to appear as journalism. When Bret Baier throws to Jesse Watters at 7 p.m. on weeknights, it’s a tacit transfer of credibility in which Watters’ world initially seems as lucid and factual as Baier’s.
This sleight of hand doesn’t fool anyone who is paying attention, but the sad truth is that lots of viewers aren’t paying very close attention, and are willing to accept as news anything that’s presented with the same sheen and signifiers of an actual story. All that most people want from their political news, on the right and on the left, is to have their priors reinforced in a way that they can defend to themselves and others—to be able to point to a specific source as a citation, and to have a rebutting catchphrase at the ready when someone else points out that source’s flaws. (The phrase “fake news” does yeoman’s work here.) Fox News exploits the essential gullibility of the median news consumer by dressing up its advocacy and opinion programming as brave, honest journalism—even and especially at those times when an actual journalist would report the opposite.
It is possible that this gulf between factual truth and the Fox News line will never permanently embarrass the network, but it’s starting to at least get expensive. This trend is thanks to the ongoing Dominion case, which has recently produced some revealing and hilarious depositions and discovery. Much of this material illuminates the disparity between what many Fox employees have said in private about Trump and his stolen election claims (he stinks and they’re stupid) and what they’ve said in public about those topics (he smells great and they’re not so stupid).
Again, not very surprising! Do the Fox hosts really believe what they’re saying? is a question I get asked a lot. While the recent document drops indicate that many of them might not be as strident as they pretend to be on television, the question is ultimately irrelevant. Yes, it’s darkly humorous to learn that on Jan. 4, 2021, Carlson told his staff, “I hate [Trump] passionately,” but it doesn’t actually matter whether the host or his colleagues are hypocrites or whether they actually believe the dumb things they say. What matters is that by saying those dumb things, they give their viewers an excuse to believe those dumb things, to defend their belief in those dumb things, and to vote and act on the strength of their thus inaccurately informed convictions.
The Dominion documents also lay bare the extent to which Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch and his subordinates see it as their mission to help Republicans win elections. They do this by peddling paranoid narratives of liberal-assisted American decline, while positioning Republicans as the guarantors of all that is good, holy, and heteronormative. This partisan pas de deux is more easily accomplished at times when the Republican Party is not led by a toxic egomaniac who likes to intimidate his followers and subordinates into abiding by his self-serving lies. Fox News is more effective when it traffics in omissions and innuendo than when it is forced by circumstance and viewer demand to platform unhinged fantasists spouting objectively insane theories. But because Fox has hitched itself to the GOP’s wagon and that wagon has largely belonged to Trump for the past seven years, the network has been dragged down into the same dirt as the party.
Murdoch—who is a pragmatist and a capitalist more so than an actual nut—has always known this, which is perhaps why his network has faltered at times in the past couple of years under the burden of having to cater to the actual nuts who have captured the GOP. The brickbats the network recently absorbed at CPAC reflect fears on the hard right that the network has gone squishy, fears that will be reinforced by the revelations in the recent Dominion depositions—or would be reinforced, at least, if Fox’s constituents trusted or paid attention to the mainstream media. They don’t, and that sad fact gives Fox News a buffer here—but it also makes the network vulnerable to attacks from its right flank. If the Dominion revelations discredit the network over the long term, it’ll be because other, harder-right outlets successfully weaponized them.
I just don’t see that happening. The real journalists at Fox who have long given the network cover have also long tempered its worst potential instincts—but the Murdochs have pushed a lot of those people out the door over the past couple of years, and the ones who are left have less internal juice than ever before. Murdoch dislikes Donald Trump slightly less than he dislikes shedding viewers and losing money, and he will always and inevitably choose profit over principles. Regardless of how the Dominion suit plays out, my bet is that Fox News isn’t going anywhere—and neither is Carlson, who understands perhaps even better than Murdoch how to sound the themes that resonate with the current conservative movement and who will keep doing so until his reluctant colleagues eventually decide to harmonize. “The people in charge of history are liars—liars,” Carlson said on Wednesday night, in a monologue heaping scorn on all those who have challenged his Jan. 6 story. “And lying is bad, and on a national scale, it’s deadly. It’s corrosive of everything that is good in the country, including trust and your grasp on reality itself.” For Carlson, and for Fox, it nevertheless remains good business.
