The Kansas City Star – Opinion
Josh Hawley thinks you’re too stupid to realize Tucker Carlson is lying to you | Opinion
The Kansas City Star Editorial Board – March 8, 2023
Fox News lies to its viewers. Josh Hawley is fine with that.
Old news? Maybe. Certainly, we’ve known of both Fox’s mendacity and the Missouri Republican senator’s cynicism for a long time. But fresh developments have revealed yet again how deep the rot goes.
Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a ludicrous alternative take on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — that deadly attack on American democracy in the name of defying the will of the voters in order to keep Donald Trump in the White House. Using a feeble smattering of clips eked out of 40,000 hours of unseen Capitol surveillance video furnished to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson made a ridiculously weak case that it wasn’t actually a rebellion against the lawful and constitutional transfer of power to Joe Biden — instead, it was simply “mostly peaceful chaos,” generated by sightseers and tourists.
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson said. It was a bald-faced attempt to rewrite history, to tell Americans that what they witnessed on Jan. 6 wasn’t real. “Gaslighting” is an overused term, but it describes Carlson’s efforts perfectly.
The good news is that many Republicans who typically defer to Fox News pushed back on Carlson’s falsehoods. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina used a barnyard epithet to describe the absurdity. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell aligned himself with a letter from the Capitol Police chief, who accused Carlson of “cherry-picking” his video clips to show calmer moments amid the insurrectionist storm.
These leaders showed it’s more than possible to be a member of the GOP and still respect the truth of what happened on Jan. 6.
Unless you’re Josh Hawley. He embraced Carlson’s version of the insurrection. “Sunshine is always the right answer,” he tweeted Tuesday, openly and directly mocking McConnell’s rightful denunciation of the Fox idiocy.
Please. It’s not “sunshine” to furnish government videos only to one favored propagandist, as McCarthy did to Carlson. Real transparency would’ve meant making the footage widely available to all the news outlets that asked for it.
But it’s no surprise McCarthy gave the videos to Fox. Over the last few weeks, filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against the network have revealed that Fox hosts were happy to air Trump’s false and discredited claims even though senior figures — all the way up to owner Rupert Murdoch and prime-time host Sean Hannity — knew at the time they were patently false. Instead, Hannity and Carlson actively undermined Fox’s few real journalists, even calling for the firing of one reporter who debunked Trump’s lies.
Why? Because they were afraid of losing conservative viewers to even further-right-wing alternatives such as Newsmax. “Weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Fox News exec Bill Sammon wrote in a December 2020 email. He might believe that. We don’t.
Fox host on Trump: ‘I hate him passionately’
Believing one thing and telling viewers another is a regular practice at Fox, clearly. Carlson is a fierce defender of Trump when he’s on the air. Behind the scenes? “I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of Trump, in a text revealed by the Dominion lawsuit. “What he’s good at is destroying things.” His viewers never heard that view.
That is the guy McCarthy put in charge of shedding “sunshine” on Jan. 6.
We don’t know Hawley’s real feelings about Trump. But we suspect that — like those up and down the ranks at Fox News — the senator knew better than to believe the former president’s lies, yet still embraced them out of expediency and fear. That’s likely why he led the ludicrous and doomed Senate effort to deny Biden’s rightful election.
Fox executives worried about losing viewers. Hawley had donors and voters to think about.
Now? There’s the matter of his reputation. Carlson on Monday said the famous video showing Hawley fleeing from the insurrectionists was “edited deceptively” by the Jan. 6 committee because, in fact, several other senators were also running away. We’re not sure how that makes Hawley look better, but the senator must take comfort in having an embarrassing moment ever-so-slightly whitewashed.
The problem is that Carlson’s insurrection denialism won’t wash. More than two dozen of Hawley’s Missouri constituents — including, most recently, a member of the Missouri National Guard — have been arrested or charged for their participation in the insurrection. Across the border, another nine Kansans have also been accused of involvement.
Anybody who cares to know what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, understands it was the bloody, violent and irredeemable affair we all saw unfolding in real time with our own eyes.
The folks at Fox News know it, no matter what Tucker Carlson says on his show. And Josh Hawley knows it too.