‘Morning Joe’ Questions if Fox News ‘Should Exist in America’ After Capitol Insurrection
MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas questioned Friday if Fox News “is a thing that should exist in America.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski said she didn’t disagree with his questioning.
Giridharadas was discussing the lasting effects of former president Donald Trump’s administration, including the deadly riot at the Capitol earlier this month.
“Part of this justice is not just on him,” he said. “It’s on the media ecosystem — Fox News and OANN and all these other things — that is not just offering a different point of view, as we all know. It is a brain-mashing machine for half of this country and we see that a large number of brains are already being mashed. We see after the terrorist insurrection that 12% of Americans supported the terrorist attack after it happened. I’m not just worried about a few thousand people on the Hill; I’m worried about several million people who are now down with terrorism as a means of political conduct. They are brain-mashing victims in addition to being perpetrators of this activity. I think we need to shift the debate to say, ‘Is Fox News a thing that should exist in America?’ Is that not a violation of the basic ethics and norms of a civil society, if not of the law?”
On Jan. 6, pro-Trump demonstrators descended on the nation’s capital to protest the certification of President Joe Biden’s win, which Trump falsely claimed since the election was the result of widespread fraud. At Trump’s urging, a mob of demonstrators breached the Capitol building, sending lawmakers into lockdown and postponing the certification. At least six deaths have been associated with the riot, including those of two Capitol police officers.
Trump was subsequently impeached on a charge of “incitement of an insurrection” in the days before he left office, becoming the only president in history to be impeached twice.
Watch the MSNBC clip above, around the :42 mark.
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