Fox News once published an article advocating that cars drive into liberal protesters attempting to block traffic.
And only after a woman was killed Saturday in Charlottesville, Va.—when a car allegedly driven by white-supremacist activist James Alex Fields plowed through a crowd of anti-racism demonstrators—did Fox decided to delete it.
On January 29, 2017, the cable outlet’s unabashedly conservative opinion site Fox Nation published an article titled, “Here’s A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road.”
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“Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks,” wrote the article’s author. “Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.”
Fox quietly deleted the article on Tuesday, three days after Heather Heyer, 32, was killed in the violent incident. Instead of an editor’s note or a statement explaining the deletion, the article was simply replaced by an error page.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine indicates that the article was live as late as early Tuesday.
Reached for comment, the network sent a statement, via Fox News Digital’s new editor-in-chief Noah Kotch: “The item was inappropriate and we’ve taken it down. We regret posting it in January.”
The now-deleted article was an aggregation of a video-centric post originally written by Mike Raust for The Daily Caller, a right-wing website founded by current Fox News primetime star Tucker Carlson.
Fox Nation’s editorial model centers around aggregating from other outlets with repackaged headlines catering to its presumably right-leaning audience. For a while, the site’s producer and managing editor was Jesse Watters, co-host of Fox primetime gabfest The Five.
The Daily Caller on Tuesday deleted the video from its server, but the article remained live. And then it was eventually removed entirely.
On a similar note, in March 2017, during protests in North Dakota against the Keystone Pipeline, Daily Caller editor Katie Frates tweeted and then deleted: “I wonder how many #NativeNationsRise #NoDAPL protesters I could run over before I got arrested #getouttamyway.”
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UPDATE: Apparently the article did quite well for The Daily Caller. Following the publication of his initial piece, author Mike Raust boasted on his personal Facebook: “Made a profit for the company today. Went from 400,000 to to [sic] 2 million views in a 24 hour timespan #winning.”
