I doubt there is anyone in America who is surprised that Fox News has decided not to carry the January 6th committee hearings. Why would they want to make their audience feel disoriented with a bunch of disturbing information they've heard nothing about despite tuning in regularly to their favorite "news" network? It would be like getting a dispatch from another planet. It's very upsetting, and if there's one thing neither Republicans nor their propaganda channels are willing to do it's make their followers angry.
Recall that Fox News was the first network to call the Arizona election for Joe Biden, which sent the entire right-wing into a frenzy. It resulted in Fox finally giving up any pretense of being a real news network. According to "Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth" by CNN's Brian Stelter, Trump got the ball rolling by tweeting out his anger and going on "Fox and Friends" to complain, asking: "What's the biggest difference between this and four years ago? I say Fox. It's much different now." Soon his rabid supporters were gathering outside the Phoenix, Arizona counting center yelling "Fox News Sucks" and Facebook groups were forming telling people to switch to Newsmax and One America News. And for a while, they did just that. In December of 2020, for the first time, Newsmax actually beat Fox News in the ratings. Fox executives greeted this crisis as an existential threat with one producer telling Stelter, "we're bleeding eyeballs, And we're scared." Their ratings were nosediving "20, 25, 30 percent, even though the news cycle was nothing short of epic." Remember, this was the post-election period — it was epic indeed. Stelter wrote:
