At what point does Fox take a host off the air for violating civilized standards of decency? Apparently there isn’t one.
Granted, Fox News isn’t a news organization; it’s a rightwing propaganda platform, a purveyor of lies (Tucker Carlson admits it), and at times of hate; yesterday, following the horrific hammer beating of Paul Pelosi, Fox host Jesse Watters (photo, left) proved that once again.
Hours after Nancy Pelosi’s husband was nearly killed by a hammer-wielding home invader in the couple’s San Francisco mansion, he said on his show, “People are being hit with hammers every day. People are being pushed into subways, slashed, shot in cold blood, but the media focuses on this one single crime to pin it on Republicans?”
He probably didn’t intend to say it’s okay to hit people with hammers, although it comes across that way. His assertion that the media ignore crime is a lie; crime reporting is a staple of the news business, and the media routinely report subway pushings, shootings, knifings, and other violent crimes.
“In Watters’ mind, the attack was nothing special in the current landscape of violent crime,” Huffington Post explains (here). Reading between the lines, it almost sounds like he’s saying Democrats created a crime problem (another lie), so Paul Pelosi had it coming.
More broadly, Watters’ outrageous remarks reflect the deluded conservative belief that Republicans are being picked on. A lot of people certainly take issue with the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election, the thousands of violent threats against election workers, and armed vigilantes staking out voting locations. If criticizing political violence committed by Republicans, or encouraged by them (e.g., talk of “civil war”), strikes a raw nerve with Watters, then I suggest they do less of it.
As for the accused perpetrator, news reports make it pretty clear he’s caught up in rightwing conspiracy theories, and there very likely was a political motive behind the attack driven in part by Republican election lies. Yes, there are mentally ill people out there; and right now, there’s no evidence he was acting at anyone’s direction. But how about taking the forest ranger’s advice, “Don’t feed the bears?” Which is what Watters is doing, and Fox is doing by letting him do it.
Related stories: Glenn Youngkin, who convinced Virginia voters he’s a “moderate” Republican, joked to a Republican crowd about the Pelosi attack (read story here); Elon Musk retweeted a baseless conspiracy theory that Pelosi was attacked while “having a liaison with a male sex worker” (read story here). Meanwhile, the attacker told police he wanted to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage (for what?) and “break her kneecaps” (see story here).