Tucker Carlson, on his Monday Fox News show, said Portland was “another beautiful city destroyed by the mob”; he called the protesters “rioters” and “the armed wing of the Democratic Party.” Mark Levin, the right-wing radio star, described the situation in Portland bluntly: “Another city goes to hell,” he declared on Tuesday.
Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican, compared the Portland protesters to Confederate secessionists at the start of the Civil War, calling them “insurrectionists” during a Tuesday interview on the Fox News morning program “Fox Friends.”
This dark framing of the situation in Portland was also apparent on Tuesday during Fox News’s 7 p.m. hour, which the network says is operated separately from its opinion shows.
The anchor, Martha MacCallum, began her newscast this way: “We’ve been seeing that all summer. It’s a showdown now between law and order in America. And it’s a showdown the likes of which we really haven’t seen since the riots of 1968.”
She spoke as footage featured gunshots, protesters breaking windows and small explosives going off in the Portland streets.
“This is a central question now for the country as we head into the election,” Ms. MacCallum continued. “Are we united behind common principles of obeying the law? Or is there a push in this country to tear down some of the systems, some of the norms, and create a new system — a new reality in America?”
After Ms. MacCallum signed off, Fox News’s pro-Trump prime time began, and the depiction of runaway violence in Portland turned more pronounced.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/business/media/trump-limbaugh-hannity.html
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