Angelo Carusone on MSNBC’s All In: Fox hosts texts to Mark Meadows are “a stunning illustration of the Trump-Fox feedback loop"
Carusone: “It shows that in real time on January 6 they knew there was a problem" but “they ran cover for him and then, to this day, continue to rewrite history”
Published
Citation
From the December 13, 2021, edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes
MEHDI HASAN (GUEST HOST): The evidence that the January 6th committee laid out tonight against former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was truly extraordinary. And it was all evidence that Mark Meadows himself turned over to the committee at his own will.
That evidence showed that a slew of Fox News hosts, from Laura Ingraham to Sean Hannity, were begging Mark Meadows to get Donald Trump to stop the siege and he refused.
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I, for one, am shocked that Fox News hosts were saying stuff in private different to what they say in public. Shocked.
Angelo Carusone is the president of Media Matters, he joins me now. Angelo, the Fox News hosts that Liz Cheney quoted are very pro-Trump, I think it is fair to say, but even they were worried in private about what was happening on January the 6th. That's a big deal, is it not? That they were in contact with the White House chief of staff, asking him to get Trump to call off the mob?
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Yeah. I mean, it is. It's a big deal because if you -- for two reasons. One, this is a stunning illustration, and it is rare to use the word stunning in relation to something Fox does, but this is a stunning illustration of the Trump-Fox feedback loop because it shows that in real time on January 6th they knew there was a problem.
They tried to protect and advise Trump to address that problem in real time. Then, after January 6th, they ran cover for him and then, to this day, continue to rewrite history.
And then the second reason is that we actually have their words that they were saying on air at the same time that they were sending these messages.
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On January 6th itself, the same day that they were sending these text messages, all three of these individuals, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade went on Fox News. And while they were telling Donald Trump that he needed to call off his supporters, they were telling Fox News viewers and the rest -- you know, American public by extension that the people that were actually attacking the Capitol were not Donald Trump supporters, but actually secretly antifa or Black Lives Matter.
Laura Ingraham called in. Sean Hannity did a show that night. Brian Kilmeade did the same thing. So they recognized in real time that this was actually Trump supporters and yet they spent an enormous amount of effort that very day lying, explicitly saying and blaming this on antifa and Black Lives Matter.