May yet have reason to wet his pants
It’s tough being a propagandist. Even on the nation’s premiere propaganda network.
BBC soft-pedals it for less-engaged readers across the pond:
Senate Republicans and Capitol police have criticised Fox News after one of its hosts aired previously unseen clips of the riot two years ago at Congress, and played down the violent disorder.
Host Tucker Carlson showed the video on Monday night, arguing it “does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress”, but rather “mostly peaceful chaos”.
A top congressional Republican gave Mr Carlson exclusive access to the video.
That would be Republicans’ spineless Speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
Carlson showed Capitol surveillance clips from areas where no violence was taking place. Elsewhere in the complex, rioters fought hand-to-hand with police, broke through windows, and ransacked offices as they and world saw through other surveillance footage and cell phone video shot by the insurrectionists themselves. Carlson described Trump fans in the halls as peaceful sightseers.
Bullshit, said North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis (R).
Former US Capitol Police officer Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, one of the officers injured that day, tweeted his “souvenir” of the attack.
BBC again:
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday it had been a “mistake for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks” about the riot.
Mr McConnell pointed to an internal memo by Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, whose agency is responsible for protecting the buildings where the lawmakers meet.
In that memo, Mr Manger says the primetime Monday broadcast was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack”.
“The programme conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” he wrote.
Poor little rich boy Carlson is being roundly lampooned for trying to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection for his MAGA viewers.
And while Carlson promised more footage for Tuesday night, he did not deliver.
Perhaps Carlson is destined to take an unplanned vacation. Murdoch may have to take drastic steps to save his network. The Dominion defamation suit is looking like a slam-dunk. Would Murdoch dare not settle out of court? Would he go so far as to give Carlson the boot?