Fox News is at it Again: On Shootings

As the number of shootings continues to proliferate in recent weeks, Fox News is unsurprisingly giving the trend its own slant. And that includes all but ignoring the Las Vegas Tea Party Cop Killing incident, according to Daily Kos. While this is nothing new with Fox, and I tend to be more interested in the increasingly right-wing leanings of the media over the past 30 years or so, they do sometimes astound with their inherent bias. In this case, they only reported on the Cop Killing binge for one day, before recycling stories about the Bergdahl prison swap, the Veterans Administration scandals and skewed coverage of the Hillary Clinton book release. Ironically, they were back on the tail of another shooting in Oregon that took place today. As the article argues, the Vegas story just doesn’t fit the Fox Creed regarding guns, racism, anti-government diatribes and rally cries for the Tea Party.

More specifically, it fails to fit their carefully constructed narrative for four main reasons: 1. The guys involved are White terrorists, a category that undermines the anti-Islam narrative they are so fond of, 2. It raises further alarm bells about access to dangerous firearms and challenges their blind NRA support, 3. One could argue that Fox is in concert with the political ideologies espoused by the killers and might even have helped “create” these two monsters, and 4. The Miller killer duo’s relationship to the Tea Party undermines their fervent support for the Koch-brothers-sponsored group. The Oregon case lacks the political contexts discussed above (except for maybe #2) and thus plays well with their sensationalist coverage in general. Good job Fox, keep up the GOOD (government hating, obstructionist, obsequious, demagoguery) work!