Let’s be clear from the jump: The pretext for the January 6 attacks were the incessant lies that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. That talk came from not just former President Donald Trump but also his allies, including Fox News.

A year later, when President Joe Biden blasted the former president for refusing to accept the election results in a speech, Fox “straight news” personalities like Bret Baier and Dana Perino complained that Biden was too mean to Trump, and that Biden’s speech was divisive instead of talking up the good moments of January 6.

Additionally, when reading from Trump’s January 6 response to Biden’s statement, two different “straight news” programs on Fox focused only on the part in which Trump bashed Biden, ignoring Trump's continued lie that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. And that claim wasn’t a one-off either: Trump’s still saying the same thing in interviews, including on Fox.

Fox is (still) caught between its audience and the facts. This tension first arose immediately after Fox called the election in Arizona for Biden, and it has cascaded since; some of the few people at Fox who stood up against the lie have since been purged. And now, over 80% of Fox viewers believe the 2020 presidential election was rigged (which tracks with how much Fox personalities pushed it – over 800 times in just two weeks after the election had been called).

And that's the core of the issue with January 6, and has been since the beginning. Republican elites across the board told their audiences that the election was rigged. The audience, having long been told to distrust the mainstream media, which was saying otherwise, naturally believed them and fought to the bitter end for it.

These latest moves are just more evidence that Fox News is intrinsically part of Trump’s political operation. The network, especially the “straight news” side, is not interested in telling inconvenient facts to its audience; Fox wants to tell viewers only what they want to hear. And even after repeatedly being sued for pushing the election lies, Fox is uninterested in confronting its own culpability for January 6.

Joe Biden used his January 6 speech to note how lies led to January 6. The biggest megaphone for those lies was always Fox News.