- Fox’s Laura Ingraham said the January 6 hearing was “bombed out” despite nearly 20 million views.
- Fox News did not air the hearing live and featured hosts who downplayed the Capitol uprising.
- Ingraham sent a message to Trump’s advisers during the Capitol uprising, urging Trump to recall the rioters, according to the jury.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham said the committee hearing on January 6 was “bombastic”, despite having nearly 20 million viewers.
Fox was the only major news outlet not to broadcast the hearing live Thursday night, which was the House’s select committee’s first big Jan.6 public hearing on the attack on the Capitol, the efforts to overturn the elections and what then President Donald Trump knew before and during the attack.
Committee members revealed that Trump and his allies staged “a coup attempt” and funded a disinformation campaign that “resulted in violence on January 6.” They also said Ivanka Trump “accepted” the Attorney General’s opinion that there was no election fraud and that several members of the Republican Congress asked for a pardon after January 6.
Ingraham’s claim that the hearings were “bombed” came when he responded to criticism of The View’s Joy Behar.
“Fox News didn’t bring the live committee hearings of January 6 last night. Shocker isn’t it? But they still had a lot to say about it,” Behar said. “The usual suspects, Tucker [Carlson] and Ingraham, dusted off their biggest hits, calling it a witch hunt, saying it’s a political revenge on Pelosi’s part, and downplaying what happened on 6 “.
Behar added, “There were no commercial breaks last night on either show. So what does he tell you? That Rupert Murdoch is so desperate to keep his viewers away from audition, along with those two, that he’s willing to lose millions of dollars “.
Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti said in a comment to Insider that The View was “wrong” and that Ingraham’s show “was not without publicity on Thursday night.”
—Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) June 11, 2022
Ingraham responded to Behar in a tweet, claiming he had “two commercial breaks on Thursday night”. According to PolitiFact, the Carlson and Hannity shows had no commercial breaks, while Ingraham “went on commercials a few times”.
“Fake. We had two commercials on Thursday night. More fake news from The View. The hearings were bombed. Face it,” Ingraham tweeted.
On Thursday at the Ingraham show, he said: “In the end, it was nearly two hours of a failed and laborious attempt to link the points back to Trump, to a coup that never happened.”
During other prime-time shows, Tucker Carlson called the hearing “insulting” and “deranged”, while Sean Hannity claimed it was a “smear campaign done for TV against President Trump with clipped and diced videos. that fitted their predetermined political narrative. “
According to The Hollywood Reporter, over 20 million attended the auditions, with ABC and MSNBC attracting the widest audience. Fox News’ regular programming during the same time period averaged around 3 million viewers.
In December, the Jan.6 committee reported that Ingraham sent a message to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Jan.6, telling him that Trump had to call back the Mafia. Ingraham was one of several Fox News hosts who appeared to privately blame Trump for the uprising, only to take a different stance on air later that day.
“Mark, the president has to tell the people on the Capitol to come home. This is hurting us all. He is destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote in a text message to Meadows during the riot.
Hannity also wrote to Meadows, asking Trump to “make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol.” Brian Kilmeade, a “Fox & Friends” presenter, wrote: “Please bring it to TV. Destroying everything you have made.”