Fox News has been a blight on this country ever since it first launched, a conduit pumping unadulterated paranoia and right-wing hatred into the homes of millions of Americans, slowly warping their worldviews and dividing them along partisan lines, but under Donald Trump, it’s somehow managed to morph into something even more sinister.
Fox is now little more than a state propaganda machine, completely untethered from reality, constantly spewing pro-Trump rubbish which has, in turn, caused it to increasingly embrace unvarnished white nationalism. Tucker Carlson’s show alone is one of the vilest, racist shows to ever air in this country.
Now, The Daily Beast has obtained Fox emails in which one of the organization’s reporters told two of his coworkers that they sounded like a “white supremacist chat room” for trying to defend Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comments after the Charlottesville debacle. The emails were originally published by FTV Live.
Yesterday, during his presidential bid election announcement, former Vice President Joe Biden zeroed in on Trump’s Charlottesville rhetoric as proof that he lacks the moral backbone to serve as president, decrying the fact that Trump “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
The Biden comments prompted Fox reporter Doug McKelway to rush to Trump’s defense, and he penned an email to numerous Fox employees which stated that he was “Putting this Biden statement out there, next to Trump’s original presser, and a live interview I did in C-ville with ‘good people on both sides’” The email included a defense of Trump’s false rhetoric that he never really said what people believe he did about the Charlottesville Neo-Nazis.
McKelway brought up a quote from one of his own past interviews with Brian Lambert, one of the men who attended the Unite the Right Rally:
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“They’re denying people their right to assemble. They’re denying their right to speak freely, however hateful their views may be,” he said.
Some of those who received McKelway’s email, like Fox News Digital Senior Editor Cody Derespina, voiced their agreement with his sentiments. Derespina also sent out an email containing an interview with Jarrod Kuhn, a man who marched at Charlottesville and who insisted he is not a white supremacist but that he didn’t want a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee removed.
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Not everyone on the email list agreed.
“I really don’t understand the point you are making. Jarrod Kuhn was one of those individuals in Charlottesville holding a tiki torch while the mob chanted ‘Jews will not replace us,” responded Fox News Radio White House Correspondent Jon Decker.
In response, McKelway backed down a bit, and linked to an article from C-Ville that revealed Brian Lambert, the man whose interview he quoted earlier in the email chain, had in fact been exposed as a white nationalist who put up rebel flag stickers around his town and used white power hand signals at his court sentencing.
“[I]t appears Lambert revealed himself to be not the squeaky clean 1st amendment supporter he claimed to be on live TV,” McKelway conceded.
Decker reprimanded him further and added:
“Based upon the slew of emails that I’ve received today, both of you should send an apology to your Fox News colleagues—many of whom are hurt and infuriated by your respective posts. Your posts read like something you’d read on a White Supremacist chat room.”
Decker should be commended for standing up to his colleagues. Now, more than ever it’s imperative to confront this ideology head-on. Trump and his racist beliefs are a tumor on this nation that can only be truly excised at the ballot box, but hatred can still be battled each day in our interactions with others.
