Fox News used the recent killing of a judge to portray the pro-abortion protesters who peacefully rallied outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes as violent.
According to media reports, a retired Wisconsin judge was killed on June 3 in a “targeted act” against the judicial system allegedly by a man who had been sentenced to prison by the judge for six years in 2005. The suspect was also discovered to have a hit list that contained other government officials, including Democratic governors and a Republican senator.
On June 6, two Fox News personalities decided to draw a link between this killing and the peaceful protests outside of conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes over the leaked draft of a majority opinion showing that the court may have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, even though there is no such connection between the two.
On America’s Newsroom, Fox contributor Jonathan Turley — also a law professor with George Washington University — said the killing is a “serious concern” and stated: “You have protestors showing up at the houses of justices. You have threats being made.” After making this connection, he acknowledged that “obviously these protesters are not there to physically harm these jurists, but it’s making many of these judges more and more concerned about themselves and their family when their houses are targeted.”
FoxNews.com highlighted Turley’s commentary in a video clip titled “Concern for judges’ safety grows following ‘targeted attack’ in Wisconsin.”
Later during the same program, Fox correspondent Gillian Turner connected the protests to the killing of the former judge — who she noted was “targeted because of his judicial decisions” — saying, “The threats against conservative Supreme Court justices in the aftermath of the leaked Roe v. Wade opinion are still a major concern to U.S. Marshals who have been assigned to protect them.” She also implicitly criticized the Biden administration, saying it “has repeatedly declined to condemn those targeted protests at the justices’ homes, still has not condemned them today.”
Turner further spoke of these protesters while covering the judge’s killing in two more reports on America Reports and Special Report.
Conflating peaceful protesters in nearly the same breath as the killing of a retired judge are not the first time Fox has smeared these protesters as potentially violent. Fox contributor Piers Morgan said the protests were “a form of terrorism.” And on Fox, Ilya Shapiro, who recently quit his job at Georgetown University Law School after he tweeted racist comments about incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pushed an unsubstantiated rumor that Justice Samuel Alito “has been taken to an undisclosed location with his family” following protests at the justices’ homes.
