OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer believes that it is imperative, in order to save democracy, that Fox News and Tucker Carlson stop showing footage he does not approve of related to the January 6 incident at the Capitol.
The senator implored Fox News head Rupert Murdoch to stop Carlson from showing any more of the footage.
“These lies continue tonight. [News Corp. owner] Rupert Murdoch, who has admitted they were lies and said he regretted it, has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight, now that he’s seen how he has perverted and slimed the truth, and from letting him go on again and again and again,” he said to reporters.
“Not because their views deserve such opprobrium, but because our democracy depends on it,” he said.
Schumer: "Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it." pic.twitter.com/uld6eaCl3C
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 7, 2023
And Sen. Schumer was not the only one from what many are calling a uniparty (Republicans and Democrats) who spoke against Carlson.
“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,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said.
“I don’t really have a problem with making it all public. But if your message is then to try and convince people that nothing bad happened, then it’s just gonna make us look silly,” Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw said.
“It’s definitely stupid to keep talking about this,” he said. “So what is the purpose of continuing to bring it up unless you’re trying to feed Democrat narratives even further?”
“The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6,” Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said. “They’ve seen the people that got injured, they saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.”
He said it was “really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that.”
“To somehow put [the riot] in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” Republican North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer said.
Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that the January 6 commission “had a partisan view of things, and I’d like to know more about what happened that day and the day before. But I’m not interested in whitewashing the COVID lab theory, and I’m not interested in whitewashing Jan. 6.”
The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police issued a memo to his staff on Tuesday following the airing of previously unseen security footage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson which showed police officers appearing to stand passively as a large crowd entered the Capitol on January 6.
Police Chief Tom Manger condemned the comments made during the airing of the footage on Carlson’s Monday night program, stating that it was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions” about the riot of January 6, 2021, when a group of people breached the U.S. Capitol building, causing disruptions to lawmakers who were in the process of certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” Manger claimed. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
NEW – Capitol Police chief Thomas Manger sends internal memo this am saying Carlson’s report was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions” about Jan. 6 and says the “opinion program” never reached out with appropriate context. Reporting w/ @rachelvscott pic.twitter.com/BrnD0n4IN1
— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) March 7, 2023
Manger specifically objected to a segment that featured Capitol Police officers guiding Jacob Chansley, also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” through the Capitol building and Tucker Carlson’s portrayal of them as “tour guides.”
He also expressed concern about Carlson’s emphasis on Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who a medical examiner found had died of natural causes after suffering a stroke a day after the January 6 incident while protecting the Capitol, the Daily Wire reported.
The New York Times initially reported on January 8 that Sicknick was killed by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher during the riot. However, the paper retracted the story five weeks later after the D.C. medical examiner stated that Sicknick had died of natural causes a day after the event. Other outlets also erroneously reported that Sicknick was beaten to death.
Nonetheless, both Sicknick’s family and the police believe that his death was related to the riot.
Video of Sicknick appearing to lead people out of the Capitol building after “he was supposedly murdered outside overturns the single-most powerful and politically useful lie the Democrats have told us about January 6,” Carlson noted.
Manger noted that Capitol Police “maintains, as anyone with common sense would, that had Officer Sicknick not fought valiantly for hours on the day he was violently assaulted, Officer Sicknick would not have died the next day.”
In his memo, Manger thanked and praised members of the Capitol Police force, commending their efforts on January 6. “You fought like hell on January 6 and risked your lives to protect the Constitution and everything this country stands for,” he wrote. “You, along with our law enforcement partners, saved every member of Congress and their staff.”
