Tucker Carlson's Depiction of January 6 Called ‘Rewriting of History at the Most Dangerous Level’
Characterization of insurrection just part of a false narrative from Fox News
Far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson is feeling a huge amount of blowback for his attempt on his program to use a trove of security footage from the Capitol to characterize the violent insurrectionists that day as peaceful sightseers.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last month provided Carlson and his staff with more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the January 6, 2021, attack, on the US Capitol Building aimed at preventing the lawful certification of Joe Biden as the next president of the United States.
Carlson, as predicted, used the footage to falsely depict the events of January 6 as peaceful.
The chief of Capitol Police blasted Tucker Carlson’s characterization of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, calling the Fox News host’s conclusions “offensive and misleading.”
In an internal memo, chief Thomas Manger wrote, “The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
Others in politics and media, likewise, slammed Carlson, as well.
“My concern is how it was depicted, which is a different issue. Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police, in my view, correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6. So that's my reaction to it,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). “It was a mistake in my view 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.”
Anderson Cooper, the longtime CNN host, took on Carlson personally, in an on-camera appearance.
“You know, I mean, the idea of Tucker Carlson being in that mob that day and not wetting his pants is hard to imagine. I mean, I find it hard to understand somebody who has never put himself in harm’s way in any capacity for anyone else or on reporting a story, and yet has the audacity to try to rewrite history,” Cooper said. “I mean, that’s what this is. It is an attempt to rewrite history on what is one of the most consequential, you know, certainly one of the biggest events in American democracy and the biggest threats to American democracy.”
Ken Burns, the award-winning documentarian, compared Carlson's efforts to that of Republican Gov Ron DeSantis in Florida, trying to influence education in the state.
“You know, what makes America great is not the suppression of ideas or the pursuit of every corner of those ideas may lead us or the facts. It’s about who we are and how we investigate who we are and celebrate the diversity of who we are,” said Burns, probably best-known for his series on the American Civil War. “All of these bills that DeSantis and others are doing limit our ability to understand who we are and are not inclusive, they are exclusive.
“They are narrowing the focus of what is and isn’t American history. It’s terrifying. It feels like a Soviet system or, you know, the way the Nazis would build a Potemkin village,” Burns added. Tucker Carlson is doing the same thing with the footage from 1/6. It’s just a kind of rewriting of history at the most dangerous level. It’s huge threat to our republic.”
Carlson pushing a false narrative for January 6 is no different from what Fox News did in promoting falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election which has no landed the right-wing network in the midst of a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought by the makers of voting machines, according to former congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill).
“Yeah, here is how Fox does it. Because — and particularly Tucker — because they realize, no matter what they say, their audience is invested in that tribal narrative. That audience is invested in the fact because they’ve been programmed by Tucker Carlson for many years,” said Kinzinger. “They’ve been invested in the fact that you have to pick your side and stick with it, no matter what the cost is, suspend your belief, suspend your disbelief, just — you know, trust us. We’re going to tell you, we’re going to give you the talking points and the arguments.
“Fox knows that’s not true. Tucker knows it’s not true. And you can see it all throughout the Dominion lawsuit. But has Fox News talked about the Dominion lawsuit? I’m going to guess probably not. Has Fox News told their own audience that they were lying to them? Probably not,” the former member of the House select committee investigating the events surrounding January 6 said. “They just keep them hooked, give them a bigger dopamine rush, give them more of that hit, and that’s how it goes.”
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