Days after court filings revealed Fox News personalities and executives privately rejecting bogus claims surrounding the 2020 presidential election, one of the network’s most-watched stars cast about its legitimacy and appeared to defend hundreds of rioters who breached the halls of Congress.
In a segment on 6 March that sought to downplay the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, Tucker Carlson said rioters were “right” to believe that the election was “unfairly conducted”.
“The protesters were angry. They believed that the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted. And they were right. In retrospect, it is clear that the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy,” he stated. “No honest person can deny it.”
He added: “The real crime, they will tell you again and again, is not what happened on Election Day 2020. The real crime is what happened two months later, on January 6.”
But according to court documents, Carlson and other top Fox News personalities, producers and executives privately rejected Donald Trump’s baseless narrative that the election was stolen from him, including bogus claims about a voting machine company suing the network for defamation, while Carlson and others broadly gesture at unfounded conspiracy theories that fuelled the attack.
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