Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) continued her assault on Fox News on Sunday evening in the wake of the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting the day before, tweeting: “We need to call it out: Fox News is a hate-for-profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists.”
Warren was responding to a tweet by Leah Greenberg, one of the leaders of the “Indivisible” movement that helped Democrats re-take the House in the 2018 midterm elections.
We need to call it out: Fox News is a hate-for-profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists. https://t.co/f1QkIE7sbB
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) August 4, 2019
There is no evidentiary link between Fox News and the shooting in El Paso. An online manifesto suspected of being written by the shooter targeted Hispanics but claimed to have drawn inspiration from other sources. The author also said that he had developed his ideas before Donald Trump ran for president.
Twenty people were killed and over two dozen wounded at a Walmart in El Paso on Saturday. Another shooting took place in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday, in which nine people were murdered (plus the shooter) and over two dozen wounded.
Warren has attacked Fox News on numerous previous occasions. In May, she turned down an invitation to hold a town hall on Fox News, and appeared to endorse boycotts of the network:
Fox News is a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists—it’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life and death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class.
Hate-for-profit works only if there’s profit, so Fox News balances a mix of bigotry, racism, and outright lies with enough legit journalism to make the claim to advertisers that it’s a reputable news outlet. It’s all about dragging in ad money—big ad money.
But Fox News is struggling as more and more advertisers pull out of their hate-filled space. A Democratic town hall gives the Fox News sales team a way to tell potential sponsors it’s safe to buy ads on Fox—no harm to their brand or reputation (spoiler: It’s not).
A Twitter account that has been linked to the Dayton shooter included left-wing tweets and statements backing Warren for president.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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