Fox News offered its viewers a distorted version of Wednesday’s GOP-run House oversight committee hearing on “Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” airing 28 minutes of Republican questioning and only 3 minutes of questions from Democrats.
Fox has pushed the myth that tech platforms unfairly censor conservative content for years. Now, Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s release of the so-called “Twitter Files,” which repackage debunked claims of bias and corruption, have supercharged those assertions.
In one instance, while Bill Hemmer — the co-anchor of Fox's so-called "straight news" program America’s Newsroom — was interviewing conservative journalists Jon Levine and Byron York, he cut to a live feed of the hearing while Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) was questioning Yoel Roth, the former head of safety at Twitter. However, once Biggs finished and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) then asked former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli about the “violent rhetoric and incitement” on Twitter leading up to the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut back to analysis from Hemmer before the Democrat had finished his line of questioning.
Conveniently, the network cut away from Navaroli right before she testified that Twitter's leadership had refused to remove posts that seemed to violate its incitement to violence policy. As reported by The Washington Post, Navaroli was one of the witnesses who testified to the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack that social media companies, including Twitter, “bent their rules” ahead of the insurrection to “avoid penalizing conservatives.”
Fox News also avoided other revelations that cut against the right’s prevailing narrative of censorship, especially those related to former President Donald Trump, who publicly lobbied Twitter to remove insulting tweets and for whom Twitter repeatedly tweaked its content moderation rules to accommodate.
“So much for bias against right-wing on Twitter” -- AOC guides Navaroli through explanation how Trump violated Twitter's policies and then Twitter changed its policies to accommodate him pic.twitter.com/51nqFSQEXG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 8, 2023
Methodology
Using the SnapStream video database, Media Matters monitored live video of all original programming on Fox News Channel for all instances when the network cut to the February 8, 2023, House oversight committee hearing on Twitter’s decision to limit the reach of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
We timed all live coverage, which we defined as instances when the network cut away from its own original reporting to a live video feed of the House hearing until it cut back to the newsroom. We noted the times when a Democratic or Republican lawmaker was asking questions during the hearing, and we also noted whether a Democratic or Republican lawmaker was speaking when the network cut back to the newsroom, if applicable.
