Fox News Whitewashes Republican Support For The Sequester

Two reports on Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier hid Republican support for the across-the-board automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, reinforcing the right-wing narrative that President Obama is the one responsible for these cuts. In reality, a majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate voted for the bill that included the sequester.

Indeed, Republican leaders at the time touted the law as “a victory” and “a positive step forward” for reducing the deficit.

In a press release shortly after the Senate passed the Budget Control Act in August 2011, House Speaker John Boehner celebrated the law as “a positive step forward that begins to rein in federal spending” while House Majority Leader Eric Cantor touted the law as a “significant move” and said it “will finally begin to change the way Washington spends taxpayer dollars.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan declared the law a “victory for those committed to controlling government spending and growing our economy.”

In total, 174 Republican representatives and 28 Republican senators -- a majority of Republicans in both chambers -- voted for the Budget Control Act of 2011.

But in recent weeks, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have been aggressively pushing myths about the sequester, including that President Obama is single-handedly responsible for the looming spending cuts.

On Wednesday's edition of Special Report, Fox News' chief White House correspondent Ed Henry framed a report on the sequester around the narrative that it was an Obama initiative and quoted Republican Congressman Randy Forbes blaming Obama for it. Though the report included Democratic Sen. Max Baucus saying that Congress shares the blame for the automatic cuts, Henry did not point out that Republicans not only actively supported the idea but overwhelmingly voted for the law.

In a later segment during the same show, Fox again covered up Republican support for the sequester. Discussing the consequences of the spending cuts, chief political correspondent Carl Cameron said, “President Obama, who first proposed the sequester, and his party, are trying to blame the GOP for dire economic consequences, in particularly to the military. But in 2009 he proposed spending $14 billion less than what the military is currently budgeted for should sequester happen.” Cameron did not mention the Republican support.