Former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly said „that diminishing the Capital Riot could never have happened“ while he was with network.
by: Dan Abrams, Aleksandra Bush, Sydney Kalich, Nexstar Media Wire ( NewsNation Now) — Former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly said he “wouldn’t have” sent the types of messages Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity sent to former chief of staff Mark Meadows during the Capitol riot. Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, vice-chair of a House committee investigating what happened Jan.6, read excerpts from the texts Monday. “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Laura Ingraham wrote, according to the excerpts. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol?” Sean Hannity wrote to Meadows about Trump, according to the text excerpts. O’Reilly said the texts may have crossed the journalistic line, but he would have to see them in the context of the discussion taking place at the time. “I wouldn’t have done it myself,” O’Reilly said on NewsNation’s “Dan Abrams Live” on Tuesday. “I would have asked the question, ‘Say, are you guys going to make a statement? What are you going to do? Looks like things are out of control?’ I don’t think I would have advocated; that’s not what journalists do. But it was in a very intense, quick-breaking situation. So I’m not going to condemn anybody here.” Abrams said the problem with the messages from Hannity and Ingraham is the hosts later minimized the riot. “I think the thing that Bill didn’t really address with me was not the fact that the Fox hosts and reporters, whoever they were, were writing to Mark Meadows and even what they were saying,” Abrams said on “Morning in America”. “It’s what they said later about it, which seemed different from what they were saying in real-time.
