Port: Thank you, Sen. Cramer, for calling a lie a lie

MINOT, N.D. — I wouldn’t normally feel obliged to offer up thanks to anyone, up to and including an elected official, for calling a lie what it is.

But here we are.

Fox News promotes lies. The cable news network solid its viewers a heaping helping of malarkey about the 2020 election, even as its top hosts and executives privately acknowledged that what they were promoting was untrue. Now, with an assist from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who gave Fox host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to tens of thousands of hours of video footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, the network is once again telling bald-faced lies.

Using selected excerpts from more than 44,000 hours of footage that nobody else in the news media has access to, Carlson has told his audience that the violent conflagration we all saw at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 was actually a largely peaceful demonstration. Then he repeated some of the stolen election lies, for good measure.

And the deeply troubling thing is that the Fox News audience is buying it.