One of the massive problems facing the political airwaves as we approach this coming November ballot box — liars have their own cable-news network.

And like the T-Rump, just don’t give a shit:

New in Public Notice: Fox News is helping Republicans bury the RNC's embrace of insurrection https://t.co/KM05Czk4Dt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2022

Rupar is way-great at observing/watching Fox News — glutton for punishment or something — and his newsletter covers the horror the operation creates on this country by shitting on the truth or staying away from a story/incident.
In his Public Notice bulletin this morning, he examines the words not spoken to defend Republicans on the insurrection/riot — highpoints:

In short, while they might feel compelled to make peace with January 6 and ostracize Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who refuse to do so, Republicans would rather talk about anything else — and they’d especially rather rail against the Democratic president.

Notably, but unsurprisingly, they’re getting a huge assist in this effort from Fox News.
…
Fox News has barely mentioned the RNC’s validation of January 6 or the censures of Cheney and Kinzinger. According to transcript searches, the censures were briefly brought up by three pre-primetime hosts on Friday, but then not at all during primetime or on Saturday.
They came up on Fox News Sunday and on Howard Kurtz’s Sunday show, Media Buzz, but then were again ignored by hosts on Monday — though Laura Ingraham did interview Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks for a segment beating up on Cheney and alleging (absurdly) that she’s part of a conspiracy to defeat Republicans (she never brought up “censure” or the RNC, however).

Meanwhile, “legitimate political discourse” has only been mentioned by a single host — Kurtz.
Completely unmentioned in Fox’s programming has been a statement Sen. Mitt Romney released on Monday rebuking his niece, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, over the censures, which he said “could not have been a more inappropriate message.”

“To suggest that a violent attack on the seat of democracy is legitimate political discourse is so far from accurate as to shock and make people wonder what we’re thinking,” Romney added.
“Anything that my party does that comes across as being stupid is not going to help us.”

By comparison, consider that Ottawa — the site of major anti-vaccine protests that have been portrayed in heroic terms on Fox — got 26 separate mentions on Fox News and Fox Business on Monday alone.

Why does this matter? Because hundreds of thousands, often more than a million people are tuned in to Fox News at any given moment, and these viewers could be forgiven for not knowing that the Republican Party’s new position that trying to overturn elections is legitimate political speech.

The irony is that asking elected Republicans if they agree with the RNC’s statement actually makes for compelling TV.
Consider, for instance, Rep. Mike McCaul’s squirming performance on Sunday’s installment of ABC’s This Week when host Martha Raddatz asked him a very simple question — “do you stand by the RNC’s actions and statements?”

“As I understand it, they were referring to the peaceful protesters,” McCaul said, even though the RNC’s censure resolution makes no such distinction and refers specifically to the January 6 committee.
Predictably, McCaul tried to quickly pivot to Biden bashing.
“We have so much to be unified against when it comes to Biden’s failed policies,” he said, before Raddatz wrapped up the interview.

The importance of this situation:

American voters face a choice between a party that has no qualms about authoritarianism as long as they’re in power and another that, for all of its problems, at least remains committed to free and fair elections.
This isn’t really hyperbole. As last Friday’s antics revealed, Republicans are barely trying to conceal what they’re about, and Trump is getting even more brazen — consider his statement from nine days ago asserting that Pence should have “overturned the Election!”

But Fox News is helping Republicans obscure the party’s increasingly open embrace of authoritarianism, and tipping the scales by relentlessly hammering Biden, sometimes in shamelessly unfair ways.
At the same time, they suppress stories that portray Republicans in an unflattering light.

I don’t pretend to have any easy solutions to this problem, but it’s at least worth understanding what’s going on — or, in this case, what’s not going on when you tune in to America’s most-watched cable “news” network.

This shit has been done before. Nicole Hemmer, author and associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project, also recognizes what the turd-backed Republicans are doing at CNN this afternoon — a must-read for the whole effect, but this may be the main poke:

The RNC’s appeal to “legitimate political discourse” is an effort to engage in the same water-muddying exercise. By attempting to make the investigations into January 6 an attack on discourse rather than a response to violence, the party is trying to cram the insurrection into a culture-wars framework.
Instead of an attack on Congress and an effort to overthrow the election, the story instead becomes one of the persecution of hundreds of patriots simply trying to voice their views and instead of running into a censorious, ruinous cancel-culture mob.
A classical reversal: the mob becomes the victim, the victims the mob.

This round of mid-terms is super-crucial for a shitload of reasons.

Yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity)‘ found here)