Fox News is presenting a seemingly scandalous headline about Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), whose sit-in for several days on the Capitol steps helped to push the Biden administration to extend the moratorium on evictions that first grew from the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Fox News has seemingly just discovered, Bush was herself evicted multiple times in her life. But this information isn’t new — it was even a big subject in Bush’s campaign for Congress in 2020.

 

What makes this article especially ignorant is that it cites in its second paragraph “state court records reviewed by Fox News,” as if this were some newly unearthed piece of information. In fact, Bush’s past experiences with evictions and homelessness were openly discussed as part of her life story in her 2020 campaign. Incumbent Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) had attempted to use Bush’s financial history against her in attacks, but she responded that this was “a struggle that I share with so many St. Louisans,” which she said “resonates with them.”

Then in the fourth paragraph, Fox acknowledges that Bush herself discussed her personal history in a letter to colleagues — with a curious use of quotation marks on Fox’s part, seeming to cast doubt on Bush’s own characterization of having lived in poverty.

So with Bush referring to her own life story in appeals to her colleagues, why did Fox even have to look through court papers and treat this like it was news? The issue even came up in reporting the story itself, which noted that a “staffer, who was visibly irritated by the reporter attempting to ask another question [about her eviction history], said, ‘Do a Google search.’”

This was not the only coverage Fox gave to Bush’s efforts to extend the eviction moratorium. Earlier on Wednesday, Fox anchor Dana Perino rhetorically asked: “You had Cori Bush, the congresswoman from St. Louis, she slept on the steps of the Capitol on behalf of the renters but what about the mom and pop landlords? Who's going to sleep on the steps of the Capitol for them?” (Just to be clear, federal assistance programs stemming from the pandemic are also available to landlords.)

If Fox News was actually concerned about a return to economic normalcy in a post-pandemic world — after the network has consistently opposed relief measures —  it would stop its efforts to keep undermining the vaccination outreach campaigns, spreading medical misinformation, and defending the honor of “unvaccinated Americans” — all while the network itself has its own vaccine passport system.