But there is one outlier. “Just so you know, this is what, on the contrary, this is the front page for our friends on Fox News Channel now,” Maddow said. “As you can see it’s a little different.” Indeed, above the fold, Fox covered everything except for fatalities.
“If you scroll down and scroll down and scroll down, you finally get – they finally arrive, oh yes, 100,000 Americans die,” Maddow said. “They finally got there.”
Maddow’s observations are not unique on the Fox homepage. Programming on-air networks Wednesday nights was similar. None of the main events were led by grim news about the death toll. Martha MacCallum, who hosted the event that was supposed to be a live Fox news program, started the show with a story about a student who was suspected of having two murder cases. It took more than 50 minutes for him to get news about 100,000 dead Americans. He saved it for the last segment.
Like the President, whose Twitter feed was focused on everything except the death toll on Wednesday night, Fox largely looked away when the death toll reached 100,000. If historians return and watch Fox News that night in that country 100,000 people die, they will be forgiven if they don’t know that happened.
It is all extraordinary. We live through what is widely regarded as one of the greatest stories of a generation, and the nation’s most watched cable news network continues to place it in the back burner.