As the nation last week was focused on bombshell revelations allegedly exposing Fox News as “a propaganda network” that is “void of the most basic journalistic ethics,” Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was handing over to that network’s top propagandist, Tucker Carlson, 41,000 hours of footage from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
“Now his shows — ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ on Fox News, and ‘Tucker Carlson Today’ and ‘Tucker Carlson Originals’ on the streaming service Fox Nation — have a massive trove of raw material,” Axios’ Mike Allen notes in an exclusive report.
“Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks,” Axios adds, noting that “Carlson has repeatedly questioned official accounts of 1/6, downplaying the insurrection as ‘vandalism.'”
Indeed, on the same night last year in June as the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack was presenting its evidence on national TV, Tucker Carlson declared, “it tells you a lot about the priorities of a ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6th tonight from our moral inferiors, no less. An outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago, but they’ve never stopped talking about it.”
Carlson on his Fox News primetime show that night called the Committee’s hearing “deranged,” and bragged, “we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth. We’ve attempted to do that since the day this happened.”
He did not stop there.
Carlson called it “vandalism” and flat-out denied it was an insurrection.
“We hated seeing vandalism at the U.S. Capitol a year and a half ago, and we said so at the time, but we did not think it was an insurrection because it was not an insurrection. It was not even close to an insurrection. Not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm – some insurrection.”
Last week a legal court filing from Dominion Voting Systems alleged that Fox News’ top brass, from Rupert Murdoch on down – including Carlson – knew Donald Trump was lying about the election being stolen.
In an opinion piece at MSNBC, senior fellow for Media Matters for America Matt Gertz writes: “Out of fear that Fox News’s audience was leaving for its competitors, the brief alleges, the network chose to buttress President Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen from him, helping to set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection.”