What: Competing visions of Seattle’s Autonomous Zone on the same news network.
Who: Fox News.
Why we care: One of the president’s biggest bugaboos recently is Seattle’s Autonomous Zone, the Capitol Hill section of the city recently vacated by its police department.
Does anyone notice how little the Radical Left takeover of Seattle is being discussed in the Fake News Media. That is very much on purpose because they know how badly this weakness & ineptitude play politically. The Mayor & Governor should be ashamed of themselves. Easily fixed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2020
Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet these same weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2020
While the folks at Fox News certainly share the president’s concerns about radical leftists, recently confusing an old Monty Python joke on Reddit with an Antifa manifesto, the network appears to be a house divided when it comes to the president’s depiction of what’s happening in Seattle.
In between photoshopping a gunman into photos of the city and running fiery videos from Minneapolis to punctuate segments on Seattle, Fox News slipped in some actually on-the-ground reporting. Fox News Chief Correspondent Jonathan Hunt reveals the peaceful daytime scene of the newly renamed Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, where he and his crew managed to brave potential Antifa attacks to buy lunch at a taco spot.
“This has been an almost entirely peaceful protest,” Hunt said on Sunday. “Couple of small skirmishes here yesterday, you may have seen them pushed by people with a particular narrative. 99.9% peaceful in this protest zone.”
If Hunt’s words here sound like a subtweet at Donald Trump, the reporter makes this point explicitly in a similar segment on Fox News the following day.
“President Trump today described the protesters as largely violent people,” Hunt says. “There have indeed been a handful of violent incidents over the past 72 hours but the FACT on the ground is this is at the moment an overwhelmingly peaceful protest.”
Not everyone at Fox News agrees with Hunt’s assessment, however.
On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson ran a segment on CHOP using a very different kind of on-the-ground reporting. The footage below, keen-eyed viewers may notice, is loaded with zooms and slo-mo and some sinister score work that would make John Carpenter jealous.
i didn't edit this footage at all pic.twitter.com/afEkKzQrXb
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) June 17, 2020
If two sides of a story are competing on the same television news network, consider trusting the side that doesn’t have to alter footage in any way to make its point.