Fox's "straight news" America's Newsroom show promoted The Guardian Angels’ vigilante attack on a man falsely called a “shoplifting migrant” on the Hannity show the night before.
As I have previously reported, failed Republican mayoral candidate and anti-immigrant vigilante Curtis Sliwa joined Sean Hannity Tuesday night to help rag on New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the man who trounced Sliwa at the polls. After Hannity portrayed Adams as a Black racist, Sliwa piled on by describing him as “single handedly destroying this city by giving illegal aliens everything.”
Then, before the conversation went much further, Sliwa announced his posse had “just taken down one of the migrant guys right here on the corner.” Fox’s camera showed the man being forced to the ground.
The Hannity show broke away but Sliwa returned later, as Mediaite explained:
“He had been shoplifting,” claimed Sliwa. “The Guardian Angels spotted him, stopped him, he resisted, and let’s just say we gave him a little pain compliance. His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations. He’s sucking concrete, the cops scraped him off the asphalt, he’s on his way to jail, but they’ll cut him loose.”
He continued, “We gotta take 42nd Street back, Sean. These illegals think they own this street, they think they rule the night. This is our country, if they can’t abide by the rules, then we’re gonna kick ’em back from where they came.”
Except the man wasn’t shoplifting and he wasn’t a new migrant. CNN reported yesterday:
“On Tuesday February 6 at 21:33 police responded to a 911 call for a ‘disorderly male,’” police said in a statement. “Upon arrival officers were informed that the male had repeatedly attempted to interfere with and disrupt a live interview. The male was issued a summons for disorderly conduct.”
A law enforcement official told CNN’s Mark Morales the man was not a recent migrant. Instead, he was a 23-year-old from the Bronx who moved to the US when he was 10 years old. The man had attempted to get Sliwa’s attention while he was on the air Tuesday night, when the group confronted him, the official said.
The Washington Post noted that none other than the Murdochs' New York Post reported that the man had been heckling, not shoplifting. The Post’s report was posted at 9:13 am ET on Wednesday, Feburary 7. But more than an hour later, at 10:57, Perino’s “straight news” show aired a clip of Sliwa telling Hannity that “one of the migrant guys” had just been “taken down.”
Perino chirped, “Curtis Sliwa and his team of crimefighters doing just that during a live interview with Sean Hannity.” She gave credence to Sliwa’s claim that the man had been shoplifting by quoting Sliwa. She added, “Others say the guy was trying to disrupt the interview,” without telling viewers that it was the police who said that, at least according to the New York Post. Then she said the police had made “no mention” to the Post as to whether the man was a migrant or a shoplifter.
Perino did not note that Sliwa never said what made the Guardian Angels think the man was a shoplifting migrant. Nor did she indicate that Fox News had done any actual reporting on the matter. “You gotta watch Hannity to know what’s going on,” she said.
Co-anchor Bill Hemmer did his part for the messaging, saying gravely that Times Square is where “those cops were beaten about a week ago.” It was an incident that prompted major right-wing poutrage (and prompted Elon Musk to go full white supremacist with the great replacement theory). Hemmer said there’s a hotel around the corner “where a lot of those are housed.”
Apparently, neither Perino nor Hemmer even bothered to talk to Sliwa. Or maybe they just didn’t want viewers to know just how bogus his "crimefighting" was.
From The Associated Press, via Media Matters:
In an interview with The Associated Press, Sliwa said he had believed the man was a migrant because he was “speaking Spanish” and because other Guardian Angels had encountered him with other Spanish speakers on previous patrols.
“He was put down so he wouldn’t hurt himself or anyone else,” Sliwa said.
But this incident is significant not just because it highlights what a pathetic excuse for a cable “news” network Fox is but for its blind encouragement of vigilantism. It has become a disturbing theme on Fox News.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump drew a direct line from Donald Trump’s 2015 fearmongering about immigrants as rapists and criminals to Fox News programming. “Fearmongering about immigrants and crime got views and it got votes, and so it got deployed,” he wrote. “So far in 2024, Fox News has mentioned both subjects in the same 30-second period more than 150 times. CNN and MSNBC have done so about 30 times — cumulatively.”
The man from the Bronx could have been seriously hurt, Bump pointed out, merely because Hannity and Fox decided to glorify Sliwa’s vigilantism. Whether or not the Guardian Angel attack was a real mistake or another of Sliwa’s fake-crime publicity stunts, remains to be seen.
I hope the man from the Bronx sues Sliwa and Fox.
You can watch Perino and Hemmer prove – once again – that Fox’s “straight news” programming is the same propaganda in a different package below, from the February 7, 2024 America’s Newsroom, via Media Matters.
