When Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, plowed his truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve — killing at least 15 people — Fox News and leading MAGA politicians immediately unleashed a targeted lie: “An illegal immigrant did this.”
The driver of the truck was a native Texan and a veteran of the U.S. Army. While these facts were not yet known, Fox News inserted its own “alternative facts.”
Fox News and some MAGA loyalists said — without a shred of evidence — that the truck had come across the border from Mexico two days earlier.
Much like Donald Trump, Fox News is a serial offender in lying to advance rightwing talking points. The lies feed the climate of political alienation, demagoguery, violence and authoritarianism in our nation.
The lies of Fox News are now rooted in the lies of Donald Trump. At times Trump invents the lie. At other times he spreads lies told by others. He is a veritable candy dispenser of lies. The ensuing politics of the lie have been marked by a spinning of the Republican Party into a web of conspiracy theories, mistrust and a constant stoking of fear about minorities and immigrants.
By embracing the opposite of responsible journalism, Fox News over its short lifespan has become the propaganda machine of the rightwing — destroying truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress and U.S. democracy.
“Fox News lies are unconstrained by any normal sense of journalistic ethics or democratic norms.”
Fox News lies are unconstrained by any normal sense of journalistic ethics or democratic norms. They project a spirit of anarchy and chaos because lies are by nature destructive. Their outsized reliance on lies and conspiracy theories ravages the truth, promotes mistrust, dismantles ethics and values, and produces hatred, anger and animosity. In a culture of lies, truth dies first. And then the darkness descends.
A media demagogue
Fox News has become a media demagogue.
There are two contradictory definitions of demagogue complicating this critique. The first definition is positive: “a leader of the people; a popular leader who espouses the cause of the people against the enemy.” The second definition: “A political agitator who appeals to the passions and prejudices of the mob in order to obtain power or further his own interests.”
One side sees the demagogue as a hero of the people. The other side understands the demagogue as a danger, a villain.
Fox News appeals to the popular. Their ratings are the highest. People see them as heroes against left-wing villains. Popularity, profits and ratings make it hard to argue with Fox News.
“Popularity, profits and ratings make it hard to argue with Fox News.”
At the same time, the demagogue is a dangerous entity. In this persona, the demagogue uses the tools of lies, misinformation, conspiracy theories and propaganda to push a false ideology.
A demagogue is a leader or entity that cannot be held accountable for their words or actions. In the world of popular media, what matters has nothing to do with the truth. Fox News sees no reason to change its lying ways, because lying is profitable. Even paying almost a billion dollars to Dominion Voting Systems for telling lies was a slap on the wrist.
Here’s the template: You take the story — a real story — like the tragedy in New Orleans and you attach a series of lies to the story that are demonstrably false. Fox even managed to implicate the truck for allegedly passing through Eagle Pass, Texas. Then said the driver was an illegal immigrant.
Even if these lies weren’t manufactured on purpose, it is shameful that Fox News jumped to these anti-immigrant explanations before the facts were known.
If Fox News were arrested for lying, the investigating detective would have a “rap sheet” long enough to fill an average book. In a 2022, report Media Matters compiled a list of lies and false statements told and retold every single weekday during Fox’s purported “straight news” programming throughout the first four full months of 2022. According to Media Matters, Fox News lied every day in the first four months of 2022. That’s at least 119 days of lies.
MAGA liars
Fox News belongs to a cadre of bad performers who have created a culture of lies.
Before any sensible person could say, “Hold your horses,” the MAGA lying machine exploded.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor, R-Ga., leaped into the water without looking: “New Orleans terrorist attacker is said to have come across the border in Eagle Pass TWO DAYS AGO!!! Shut the border down!!! Who did our government bomb lately that is taking it out on innocent Americans?”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.: “The tragic terror attack that killed innocent people in New Orleans is a stark reminder of the importance of strong leadership. America needs a fearless fighter like @Kash_Patel at the FBI.”
President-elect Trump: “When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”
Even after the “facts” were known and Trump knew he had been wrong, he posted on Truth Social: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.’
A glutton for lies
Even after Fox retracted the immigrant lie, network figures were unrepentant and returned to the original lie: Immigrants are criminals. The southern border is open.
Fox, like a glutton unable to stop eating chocolate cake, could not stop spewing false claims.
A Fox News talking head: “I want to talk about the particular truck that was used in this. we know that it was a rental, we know that it was brought from Texas and it was spotted in Eagle Pass, Texas, back on November 19. But we understand that the truck does have a history of plate readers. It never actually passed through Mexico into Eagle Pass. However, the license plate on this truck has a history of plate readers at the border in patterns, and I’m quoting, that may be suspicious of human smuggling.”
“Fox, like a glutton unable to stop eating chocolate cake, could not stop spewing false claims.”
Fox News National Correspondent Griff Jenkins claimed the attack is “raising new concerns about the terror threat across the country, including at our southern border.”
Todd Piro asked, “Would you say we are at pre-9/11 threat level specifically because of Joe Biden’s border policies — in other words, is there an extensive ISIS threat in our homeland?”
On Hannity, incoming Trump administration border czar Tom Homan claimed Joe Biden “bragged” that the New Orleans attacker is a U.S. citizen and said the border was the “biggest” national security threat. Guest host Tammy Bruce also warned, “Now we have millions of people, we don’t know who they are, hundreds of people — regarding the terrorist watchlist, people who are dangerous, who are roaming about.”
Nathan Sales, a former counterterrorism coordinator under Trump, stated that “the person who committed this attack was indeed an American citizen, but let’s indeed not take our eyes off the bigger picture here, which is that over the past four years, millions of people have come into the country. We have no accountability for who they are, and we have to take seriously the risk — the threat that some of these people may be here to do us harm.”
Be alert to spot lies
Behind all this: Trump’s years of false claims about immigrants reinforces the mistaken assumption that violent crime is disproportionately committed by illegal immigrants.
Now, Trump and Fox News have created a symbiotic relationship that festers with false narratives. If we understand the strategy of these lies, we will know how to be alert for the cascade of disinformation.
Here’s what Fox does: Take the message (as they want to see it) and broadcast it and repeat it. If that message fails, deny its failure and try it again and again and again. But above all, keep trying the same thing.
This is the same strategy as Trump, who never admits anything he has said is wrong, never confesses his lies, never apologizes.
Fox News and its supporters are all part of the culture of lies. And they are determined to have power over everyone.
We can be regenerated as a people of truth if we keep going back to our sources, reinterpreting the past, asking serious questions, never settling for less than the truth, and reinventing the community of democracy.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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