This must have been another howling, accusatory mess on January 6, 2021 similar to Donald Trump’s reportedly trying to take the wheel of the Secret Service van he was in, when the driver told him, no, he would not take Trump to the Capitol, he was returning to the White House. Trump doesn’t take no for an answer very well. If we have seen him demonstrate one premise, over and over again, that is his hallmark, is that you can’t tell him “no.” That is his sacred “N-word” nobody dare say it to him.
But Fox News did dare. They could see the handwriting on the wall and decided not to give him their platform to use. Why, we don’t know but hopefully will find out. CNN:
“The afternoon of January 6, after the Capitol came under attack, then-President Trump dialed into Lou Dobbs’ show attempting to get on air,” Dominion lawyers wrote in their legal brief.
But Fox executives vetoed that decision,” Dominion’s filing continued. “Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. January 6 was an important event by any measure. President Trump not only was the sitting President, he was the key figure that day.”
The network rebuffed Trump because “it would be irresponsible to put him on the air” and “could impact a lot of people in a negative way,” according to Fox Business Network President Lauren Petterson, whose testimony was cited by Dominion in the new filing.
Dobbs’ show on Fox Business – in which he routinely promoted baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election – was canceled a few weeks after the January 6 insurrection.
It’s just one more interesting fact on a pile of interesting facts that prove up that on January 6, people who were not duly elected members of government, for the most part, were actually making decisions about the direction that the government should go that day, because the titular head of said government was out of control. And everybody knew it.
And what if Fox News had put Trump on the airwaves? We will never know, we can only speculate. Trump might have gone bonkers on air, proclaiming that the election had been stolen and the only way to preserve democracy was for Americans to storm the Capitol and effect mob rule. That is entirely plausible. Just a few minutes before, at the Ellipse, Trump had said MAGAs needed “to fight like hell or you won’t have a country left.”
Anything was possible that day. We will probably never know why Mike Pence didn’t want to get into a Secret Service car because he wasn’t sure of the loyalties of whomever was driving the car. That is a sobering fact. Never forget, the crowd was out there in the streets chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Fuck Mike Pence!” We never saw that in this country before, and hopefully we never will again.
It’s a shame that the January 6 Committee didn’t know about this. It also begs the question of what else didn’t they know, due to the degree to which they were stonewalled?
I am quite surprised the execs at faux nuz had the sense to do this. I would have expected the opposite from them.