WAPO: Fox News's no-good, very bad week.

[lindysalsagal]

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=5adfa960ade4e26417b9dae7&s=640a502ad8b4d16075483117&linknum=5&linktot=40



Emailed to me, so no paragraph limit:

(By Michael de Adder)

Tucker Carlson is having a tough week. But that’s nothing a little creative editing can’t fix. Give him enough footage of his past few days and enough time to arrange it, and he’ll pull together a much, much nicer version.

That’s what he did with Jan. 6, 2021, in a rendering of the insurrection he presented this week on his Fox News show, stitching together nonviolent snippets to paint a picture of peaceful protest. That, columnist Paul Waldman writes, “is the equivalent of a murder suspect saying, ‘Why aren’t we talking about all the people I didn’t kill?’ ”

Paul’s piece breaks down all the ways Carlson’s video faceplanted, including by galvanizing Republican senators against it and getting the public thinking once more about the nastiness of Jan. 6.

But satirist Alexandra Petri saw the genius of Carlson’s work and wondered what he could do to rehabilitate other disasters. Maybe the Hindenburg was flying great, most of the time. Or a mass extinction event? “If this meteorite really did hit, then why do I have so much footage of dinosaurs just walking around, eating leaves and, frankly, boring me to tears?”

It’s not just Carlson taking hits this week. All of Fox News has a big black eye after new documents were revealed in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against the network. Erik Wemple distilled the latest filings into five takeaways; none is a good look for the network. Facts were under siege, top hosts were disingenuous and viewers were taken for suckers.