Fox News didn’t need any actual facts about the Capitol Hill shooter before the network started fear mongering that it might be an ISIS attack. Or, on Fox Business, that we need to start cracking down on Muslims. As it turns out, the suspect is an American Christian.
As Mediaite reported, when very little information about the shooting was known, Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge started suggesting that the shooter was a member of ISIS. First, Herridge highlighted the fact that reports said a nearby civilian had been hit with “shrapnel” and idly wondered “What to make of that at this point, whether it was bullet shrapnel or something else.”
Enter Herridge again, moments later, who drew on the fear from last week’s Belgium attacks:
“ISIS likes to sort of flood the airwaves, if you will, after an event like [Belgium] to kind of capitalize on the event. And in the last 24-48 hours, there have been several messages specifically about the United States.”
Of course, Herridge doesn’t clarify what “messages” she’s referring to from the global radicalized terror group in the last day, but specifics don’t matter in real-time fear mongering. “I’m not saying they’re connected because we don’t have that information at this point, but people are pretty keyed up.”
As Raw Story noted, Fox News contributor Bo Dietl did his part for the “be very afraid of Muslims” cause over on Fox Business Network by calling for more scrutiny of American Muslims, even as he praised the “so many good American Muslim people.”
DIETL: We have to be on guard all the time. …And part of my thing about the political correctness is, look, we’ve got very, very fine Muslim-American people that live in neighborhoods, that have great families, and their most important thing in life is to take care of their families and the safety of their family.”
I don’t talk about going into Muslim neighborhoods and putting a omnipresence there like Stormtroopers. What I talk about is having a lot more Muslim police officers — uniform and plainclothes — which can speak out, they talk to people: “What’s going on?” “You see something suspicious, I drive by, you call me over, let me know.” You have to have that communication back and forth. That’s the most important thing, is intelligence.
…What I want to do is, I mean, what we want to do is stop the attack from happening before it happens and we all have to be together. …Political correctness is very good but if I’m searching for gangs up in East Harlem that are robbing people all over the place, I’m gonna use undercovers that are Spanish or black of whatever so let’s be real about it. If you’re looking for Muslim terrorists hiding in Muslim neighborhoods, you’ve got to bring Muslim people in there, people that can speak Arabic, people that can blend in there. And there are so many good American Muslim people and so I don’t think that it’s a bad thing because certainly they’ll want these people to be taken out and eradicated out of their neighborhoods where they don’t have to have the threat with their children being there being blown up by some bomb.
Now that the suspect in the Capitol Hill shooting, Larry Dawson, has been identified as an American Christian, Fox will probably shrug off the incident as a one off from a nutcase and not worth talking about. But wait, he’s African American! Will Fox News start blaming Black Lives Matter?
Watch Dietl below, via Raw Story.
There are the uninformed. They don’t really pay attention. We’ll ignore these for now because typically they’re not into politics.
The other camp are the misinformed. They live in information bubbles like talk radio and Fox News. They cling to their misinformation with a death grip, refusing to accept any contrary facts or information.
In the context of this (or any other) Fox News spew it’s easy for Fox fanboys and girls to reflexively drive bile up their throats over Fox’s partisan and exploitive propaganda but wholly overlook the fact it ends up total horses—t. Yet, their angst grows.
Except,… wait!! Oh my Ghod!!!
We’re surrounded!!!
Pfft . . . c’mon, Ellen. Why would Fox stop there?
The shooter was African American — you KNOW they’ll
blame President Obama . . .
.