Keeping in lockstep with President Donald Trump, Fox News continues to help stoke fears by deceptively recycling old footage of violent acts and presenting them as current news, according to the media watchdog group Media Matters.
The president’s favorite network, which caters to almost every Trump whim, used its prime-time programming to bombard frightened followers with incendiary images of violence that were “days or months old” in August.
According to the nonprofit organization, Fox’s prime-time lineup of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham ran 3 hours and 15 minutes of “violent” imagery last month that included images or videos of burning objects or fires 81 times.
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The watchdog group also said that on “at least” 50 occasions, the images Fox used in its programming about ongoing chaos were more than five days old. According to Media Matters, more than 20 of those images used in August dated back to May and June.
“Fox News is bombarding their viewers with imagery of violence that is often out of date and placed in order to manufacture a narrative that chaos is brewing and that there is an existential threat on the horizon,” Media Matters President/CEO Angeloa Carusone told the New York Daily News.
“To put it bluntly, they’re working their audience into a fear-fueled frenzy with an intent to stoke violence. The network is flirting with violence because they think it serves their political interests,” she said.