If there was one thing that Trump sycophants and Jan. 6 texters Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham wanted Fox News viewers to know on Thursday night, it was that the primetime Jan. 6 committee hearing was an absolute flop.
Of course, the network’s audience had to take the hosts’ word for it as Fox News’ primetime hosts refused to air the House select committee’s televised hearing.
After the broadcast networks, CNN, and MSNBC had all announced they would broadcast Thursday night’s much-hyped congressional hearing in its entirety, Fox News Media revealed this week that its coverage would be relegated to its little-watched sister network Fox Business and online platforms. Fox News’ primetime lineup, meanwhile, would air as scheduled, providing MAGA-friendly counterprogramming and dipping into the hearing “as news warrants.”
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During the hearing’s first hour, which featured damning revelations including that then-President Donald Trump felt his vice-president “deserv[ed]” to be hanged, Fox News star Tucker Carlson sneered through a commercial-free tongue-lashing of the committee while cycling through a series of guests who pushed a revisionist history of the Capitol insurrection.
"This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live,” Carlson boasted on Thursday night. “They are lying and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is try to tell you the truth.”
Carlson would spend much of the rest of the hour endorsing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen while justifying the rioters' actions on Jan. 6, insisting that they “should have been” upset that President Joe Biden won the election. He also asserted that the “most disturbing” part of the insurrectionist attack was Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) telling police officers to use their guns to protect the Capitol.
Picking up where Carlson left off the following hour, Hannity immediately declared that the hearing—which was still ongoing and had just featured a shocking video compilation of the rioters’ violent actions—was “the dullest, the most boring, there's absolutely nothing new, multi-hour Democratic fundraiser masquerading as a Jan. 6 hearing.”
Besides preemptively labeling the night a failure for the bipartisan panel investigating the assault on the Capitol, the man once known as Trump’s “shadow chief of staff” insisted there was only one winner from the hearing: Trump.
Even though the committee detailed the ex-president inaction in deploying the National Guard and military to defend the Capitol, and a Capitol Police officer testified about “slipping on people’s blood” during the “carnage,” the Fox News host exclaimed after the hearing wrapped up: “The one person who looks good is Donald Trump.”
Continuing the theme of dismissing the committee as a “partisan witch hunt” and Democratic “propaganda,” Ingraham kicked off her hour by parroting Hannity’s claim that the hearing was a complete dud.
“Democrats and liberals have been flopping in primetime television for years,” she snarked. “It’s always the same—misleading information, vicious innuendo, attempts to connect the dots that never quite pay off.”
Calling it “bad programming,” Ingraham dismissed the attack on the nation’s capitol in order to stop the certification of Biden’s election as largely inconsequential and minor.
“How does a guy putting his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk put democracy at risk?” Ingraham wondered, referencing the Capitol riot defendant who notoriously placed his foot on the Speaker’s desk after the violent mob breached the building.
“In the end, this was nearly two hours of an unsuccessful, laborious attempt to connect the dots back to Trump, to a coup that never happened,” she claimed, adding: Democrats always flop in primetime, OK? It’s a given!”
