This week, a huge Christmas tree outside of the News Corps/Fox News building in Mid-Town Manhattan was set ablaze, and a 49-year-old Brooklyn man has been arrested in connection with the arson attack. Fox News has been giving the attack nonstop coverage — and CNN's Brianna Keilar is calling out the right-wing cable news outlet's blatant hypocrisy in light of how badly it has "downplayed" the violence that occurred at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6.
On the CNN morning show "New Day," which Keilar hosts with her colleague John Berman, she showed clips of Fox News hosts bloviating and hyperventilating over the arson attack, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. "Fox and Friends" host Brian Kilmeade was especially melodramatic, saying, "It's emblematic of cities across America that are out of control." And his "Fox and Friends" colleague Steve Doocy said, "This city has gone south when it comes to safety. We don't feel safe when we come to work in the morning."
Keilar called out the arson attack as an appalling criminal act. But the CNN host, noting that Fox News has made the arson attack "the centerpiece of its coverage," emphasized that Fox's hosts didn't express nearly as much outrage after a violent far-right mob attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6.
Keilar said of the arson attack and the Christmas tree, "Now, no one was injured in this incident, but they could have been. This is a serious incident. Obviously, it's incredibly scary to feel that your workplace is under attack — unless your workplace is the Capitol. Then, according to many, many Fox hosts, it's not such a big deal."
To illustrate her point, Keilar showed clips of Carlson and Doocy claiming that the January 6 insurrectionists were generally peaceful. Carlson, in one clip, is seen saying of the rioters who invaded the Capitol, "They don't look like terrorists; they look like tourists." And in another clip, Carlson describes the Capitol riot as "a political protest that got completely out of control."
Keilar commented, "At Fox, when the target is a Christmas tree at their workplace, it is a sacrilege. But when the target is the seat of American democracy, it's not. The whole of Congress, as they certify a presidential election that was fair and secure — when the perpetrators are Trump supporters in the thousands, four of whom died that day, when the victims are police officers…. Fox downplays the attack, and in many cases, flat-out doesn't cover it, ignores that it ever happened. Just imagine if Fox hosts could muster, for an armed attack on the Capitol, the same outrage that they did for their Christmas tree — perhaps some of the almost half of Republicans who think January 6 was a legitimate protest might actually see it for what it really was."
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