You Will Totally Believe Which “News” Network Won’t Be Showing the January 6 Hearings Live

“Cater to our audience.”

Donald Trump and Laura Ingraham.Luis M. Alvarez/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On the week of the long-awaited January 6 hearings, America’s top-rated cable news network announced that it wouldn’t carry any of them live. Instead, Fox News will continue to feed its viewers their regular diet of spin from Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. 

Fox’s hosts “will cover the hearings as news warrants,” the network said Tuesday in a statement to the New York Times

Ingraham expanded on that justification with a laudably candid admission, saying that Fox does “something called, you know, cater to our audience.” 

Earlier this week, Carlson called the hearings “grotesque.” Meanwhile, both Ingraham and Hannity have found themselves caught up in the fallout from the committee’s investigation. In December, the committee released Ingraham’s and Hannity’s communications with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows on the day of the attack. The texts showed both hosts in a state of panic over what they immediately recognized to be a chilling assault incited by the defeated president.

“[Trump] needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham begged Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

To give Fox it’s (very small) due, the network isn’t avoiding the hearings entirely—hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will be covering them live on the lesser-watched Fox Business channel. But the decision to filter one of the largest news stories of the year through the opinions of Ingraham, Carlson, and Hannity cuts quite a contrast to the 1,100 news segments the network ran on the terrorist attack in Benghazi.

As the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump pointed out, this move isn’t exactly unexpected, and Fox has a history of cutting away from live hearings and impeachments at points when information contradicting the network’s narrative seems to emerge. 

The odds were always close to zero that the network would give the hearings the treatment they warrant, and the announcement simply reaffirms that the battle lines over January 6 have already hardened. Republicans have their (completely baseless) narrative: January 6 was a minor scandal at worst and a “tourist visit” at best. The people who stormed the capital chanting “hang Mike Pence” were patriotic Americans—incited or egged on by a loose mix of federal informants and/or antifa operatives—who have since been unfairly persecuted by law enforcement.

Fox has played its part in helping these fabrications take hold. No matter how damning the committee’s findings turn out to be, don’t expect the hearings to shake them loose.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate