About Those Fox News Hosts’ Texts to Mark Meadows…Five Key Takeaways

Photos courtesy of CNN

Political observers are starting to recover from the shock of hearing Rep. Liz Cheney read aloud texts from three Fox News Hosts to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The texts demonstrate the need for Meadows to testify about what he knows, heard and saw. But they also shine a harsh light on Fox News itself. There are at least five big takeaways to consider as we assess the fallout.

Fox News Created the Very Monster It Feared

The texts demonstrate alarm and even panic by three Fox News hosts over the violent attack on Congress. But these same three individuals spent months after the election questioning its legitimacy.

“Do you trust what happened in this election?” Sean Hannity asked his audience. “Do you believe this was a free and fair election?” Following the election, Hannity tapped into the deep mistrust over the process that Trump had stoked without basis. “Tonight every American should be angry, outraged and worried and concerned about what happened in the election and the lead up to the election,” he declared. For her part, Laura Ingraham claimed she had “many questions” about the process and alleged there were “unverifiable dumps of votes” infecting the total numbers. Ingraham asked, “Is the fix already in?”

Media Matters analyzed and reported the number of instances in which Fox News cast doubt upon the election in the two weeks following the network calling the election for Joe Biden. It was an astounding 774 times. After whipping their viewers into frenzy, these hosts seemed stunned in their texts to Meadows that things would ever grow so violent and extreme. In short, they apparently had no concept of the damage they had done and no way to effectively control it.

They Knew These Were Trump Followers But Lied Anyway

The frantic texts had begged Meadows to get Trump to make the crowd of his followers stand down. They show unequivocally that Hannity, Ingraham and Kilmeade understood, at least in their private texts, precisely who had attacked the building that afternoon. And yet, that very night the hosts were busy publicly deflecting blame and hatching new conspiracies.

“From a chaotic Washington tonight, earlier today the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement,” Ingraham said on her show that evening. “Now, they were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”

“I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence in a big situation,” Brian Kilmeade said, implying that these were somehow people other than what everyone saw. And Sean Hannity said, “[T]here’s always bad actors who will infiltrate large crowds,” implying again that the bulk of the protestors were not to blame. “I don’t know if they’re radical left or radical right, they’re not people I would support.” To this day, a sizable percentage of GOP voters believe, falsely, that Antifa or the FBI are to blame for the attack.

The Fox Hosts Had Direct Lines to the White House

Setting aside the substance of the texts, the very fact that three of Fox News hosts had an inside line to the White House chief of staff is both telling and disturbing. The hosts apparently had established a real-time feedback loop, in which Meadows was the intermediary, to not only be the president’s mouthpieces and beat the White House drum as needed but to make actual demands on the administration such as ordering his rioting followers to stand down.

Try to imagine, for a moment, the uproar if it were discovered that Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper had texted to the Biden White House with their own demands. It’s nearly inconceivable because no even remotely comparable relationship exists on the Democratic side. Mainstream media still honors and protects the dividing line between journalism and the political leaders it seeks to keep honest.

These texts, by contrast, demonstrate that the former administration and Fox News were two parts of a political ecosystem. Ingraham’s text is particularly telling. “This is hurting all of us,” she wrote to Meadows—confirming that damage to the Trump White House and legacy equated to damage to Fox News and other Trump allies. That is because Fox News operates not just as state propaganda, but sometimes, as these texts reveal, even as the origin point for executive branch policy or action. We already knew that nothing close to arms-length let alone objective reporting occurs with Fox News; what was less clear until now was that Fox News will sometimes actually seek to call the shots in order to protect itself.

The Response Now Is To Play the Victim

After an awkward day-long silence over the damning texts, the Fox News hosts went on the offensive. Hannity claimed the broadcast of the texts was a “weak attempt to smear him,” even though nothing but his own words to Meadows were read aloud by Rep. Cheney. Hannity also wanted to know why there was not “outrage in the media” that his privacy had been violated by having texts released publicly, attempting to shift the narrative away from what his text said and toward the fact that they were made public.

For her part, Ingraham ranted about “left wing media hacks” and (without irony) the “regime media” for calling her a hypocrite. Then she doubled down on her stance. Looking straight at the camera, Ingraham said, “But, it was not an insurrection. To say anything different is beyond dishonest and it ignores the facts of that day.”

Speaking of the Facts, Fox News Is Rewriting Them Frantically

Fox News knows that the unfolding narrative about January 6, led by the former third most powerful GOP House leader, Liz Cheney, can do real damage to the Republican brand and now even Fox News, which was apparently embedded deeply with the White House and may face investigations of its own. To counter this, host Tucker Carlson has put together a 3-part “documentary” that rewrites January 6 entirely based on unfounded conspiracies and baseless claims. 

The piece is so bad that it is driving what few moderating voices remain at Fox News away. Two long-time conservative commentators, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, found their breaking point with Carlson’s series and tendered their resignations.

“It’s basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the War on Terror 2.0,” Goldberg told NPR. “It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw.” And yesterday, long-time Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who is known for directing tough questions to both sides of the aisle, also called it quits.

The January 6 Committee likely has far more information and evidence linking Fox News to the Trump administration. It will be interesting to see whether election misinformation and false election fraud claims made their way directly out of the Oval Office via Meadows and others and over to Fox News. The network is already facing billion-dollar lawsuits for defamation from voting machine and voting software makers. Should the evidence also show any direct involvement of the network in efforts to help overturn the election, a whole new front might open in the long battle for accountability.