How does Fox News deal with revelations that a member of a powerful family in conservative politics is a child molester and perpetrator of incest?
Answer: It doesn’t.
A few days ago, I questioned why Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace hadn’t asked Mike Huckabee, during their recent interview, about his unwavering support for the Duggar family in the wake of the scandal. Now we know Wallace was following some Fox News code of silence. Or near silence. During the four days following the bombshell that Joshua Duggar had molested several underage girls and that his father, Jim Bob Duggar, had waited one year before reporting that to the police, Fox spent a little more than one minute reporting the story.
Media Matters did the math so we didn’t have to:
Media Matters also notes:
The Duggar controversy has put Fox News in an awkward position. Before he resigned the day In Touch’s story broke, Josh Duggar was the head of the Family Research Council’s (FRC) political wing. Representatives of FRC, an anti-gay hate group that routinely links homosexuality to pedophilia and describes LGBT people as a threat to children, are a regular fixture on Fox News.
Do you think Fox would be so quiet if the same thing happened in, say, Stephen Colbert’s family?
Thanks to other numerous outlets the story is all over the news. The Duggars are history, and so is Hucky for supporting a child molester.
NOTE TO SUITS
Sending internal emails to producers and mouthpieces to stay silent on certain topics won’t work. All of the secrets will become public knowledge anyway.
