If you watched Fox News the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, you probably didn’t think it was that bad. That night, Sean Hannity falsely told his viewers that Black Lives Matter protesters and other progressive activists had infiltrated the pro-Trump crowds. Ever since, they’re all either downplayed it or spread baseless, bonkers conspiracy theories. But on Monday, the House committee investigating the fateful day made public frantic texts some of the network’s stars sent that day. And thanks to CNN, you can see how they directly contradict what they were telling Fox News watchers.
The video juxtaposes the texts of three network hosts with what they told viewers. There was Laura Ingraham, who sent a message to former chief of staff Mark Meadows, in which she was clearly flustered. “The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” she wrote. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
Jump to July and Ingraham seemed blasé about it. “It was not a terrorist attack,” she told her loyal fans. “It wasn’t 9/11, it wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to America, it wasn’t an insurrection.”
There was Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends. “Please get him on TV,” he wrote on Jan. 6, claiming he was “destroying everything you have accomplished.”
But a mere four days later, Kilmeade had already changed his tune. “He was not saying go take the Capitol,” he said of Trump’s inciting speech before the Capitol building was breached by his violent supporters. “He was going to go protest at the Capitol. He wasn’t saying take the bike racks and throw them.”
And who texted Meadows the words, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.” Why, that’s Sean Hannity, who on Jan. 11 was complaining about how “Trump supporters are getting blamed for what happened at the Capitol,” and claimed the “vast majority” of protesters “did so peacefully.”
Did their private communiqués gibe with their public exhortations? Not really. But CNN’s John King went further than that, calling it “hypocrisy” and calling them “not journalists”:
“Number one, everything they did violated journalism ethics, reaching out to Mark Meadows. But number two — they’re not journalists — number two, the hypocrisy. To pretend it didn’t happen. On that day it was urgent, on that day the president has to do something, on that day the president has to save his legacy [and] then by that night on TV, [the riot was] not a big deal. And to this day, [the riot was] not a big deal.”
To King, the Fox News hosts’ contradictory statements only stresses “why it is so critical to get to the full truth of that day.”
You can watch the video above.
(Via Raw Story)
Source: https://uproxx.com/viral/cnn-fox-news-hannity-ingraham-jan-6-texts/