The truth about Jan. 6 will not bring Trump down as long as Fox News exists: analysis
Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Tyler Merbler/WikiMedia Commons)
December 16, 2021
The revelations from this past week about Jan. 6 should destroy any chance that Donald Trump could win -- or even be allowed to run for -- the presidency again, but he'll likely survive these latest bombshells thanks to the help of some of the conservative media figures who turned up in the new evidence.
The House Select Committee released new evidence of behind-the-scenes efforts to deprive Joe Biden of the presidency he won, and panicked messages from Trump family members, Republican lawmakers and Fox News broadcasters to the White House asking Trump to call of his mob of supporters -- and all those individuals have since denied basic facts about the riot and tried to block any investigation, reported CNN analyst Stephen Collinson.
"The scale of the evidence coming to light this week is remarkable. But daily bombshells about what happened on January 6 often have the effect of diminishing the shock value of Trump-related outrages," Collinson wrote. "And voters have pressing concerns like the rising cost of living and a pandemic that will shortly drag into a third year. Yet this week's developments are important not just because they chart the staggering breadth of Trump's election conspiracy. They are also exposing the lies on which his future political prospects are built -- and on which multiple Republican-run states have passed laws that make it harder to vote and easier to steal future elections." Trump should be mortally wounded by the revelations, but he's insulated from accountability by his well-honed confidence game and assistance of Fox News hosts whose newly revealed texts to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows show they held Trump responsible for the riot but publicly told viewers the president's opponents caused the violence.
READ: A sociologist explains the biggest mistakes the media is making about our political moment"The mendacity of the conservative media propaganda machine was exposed by Cheney's reading aloud of texts sent to Meadows by several Fox News powerhouses, including Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, pleading with Meadows to get Trump to intervene on January 6," Collinson wrote.
"Both anchors later condemned the violence on January 6," he added. "But they have been among Fox News personalities who attack the investigation as a political vendetta against Trump rather than a probe into one of the worst assaults on democracy in American political history. And television disinformation is only a small part of the problem; social media networks teem with falsehoods about the election and boost Trump's lies in what is almost a fact-free zone."
But the twice-impeached one-term president's defenders have learned the best way to escape accountability is to flood the zone with lies.
"This week's revelations have been damning for Trump, his former aides and the conservative media propagandists who sustain him," Collinson wrote. "But if history is any guide, the truth will not bring him down."
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