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Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge Olivia Riggio ([link removed])


Fox News: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin sued for turning back on Asian attack victim as anti-AAPI hate crimes soar 567%

A Fox News story (1/27/22 ([link removed]) ) that used anti-Asian hate crimes to swipe at a favorite Fox target—a progressive DA ([link removed]) —was accompanied by a video that put Fox's typical anti-China spin on a space story.

In crafting a landscape rife with danger and lawlessness, Rupert Murdoch–owned outlets drew upon a spike in hate crimes—specifically anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes—without taking responsibility for the xenophobia they’ve consistently peddled when it benefited their political agendas.

Fox News (1/27/22 ([link removed]) ) in January reported that the Asian-American victim of a 2019 attack was suing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for mishandling his case, just one day before the San Francisco police department announced that hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were up 567% in the city in 2021 compared to the previous year. The story also mentioned a 60% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2020.

Early last month, Fox (2/2/22 ([link removed]) ) reported on the arrest of a man suspected of spray painting swastikas on several Jewish schools and synagogues throughout Chicago. “The incidents came days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and as antisemitism is on the rise across the country,” the piece says. Another Fox headline (2/7/22 ([link removed]) ) declared, "NYC Antisemitic Crimes Up Nearly 300% in January"; the story noted that "there were 15 hate crimes committed against Jewish people in January—a 275% increase compared to the four hate crimes recorded in January 2021."

Meanwhile, Murdoch's New York Post (1/21/22) ([link removed]) published “NYC Hate-Crime Complaints Skyrocket, With Anti-Asian Attacks Up 343%.” Citing NYPD data, the article also noted that the largest portion of hate-crime complaints in the city in 2021 was for anti-Jewish incidents.

The Wall Street Journal (1/26/22 ([link removed]) ), another Murdoch property, reported on an incident at a virtual meeting of National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum when a “Zoom bomber” hacked the group and projected anti-Asian images and audio onto the screen. “Major cities have reported an increase in hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans,” the article said, also citing the San Francisco and New York police department numbers.

Murdoch’s own outlets, however, often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place.


** Scapegoating China
------------------------------------------------------------
Watters' World: Chinatown

The O'Reilly Factor's Jesse Watters (
">10/3/16) pretends to perform martial arts as part of a race-baiting report from New York's Chinatown.

The rise in anti-AAPI violence is connected to both the rise of a new cold war with Beijing and the scapegoating of China for the Covid-19 pandemic (FAIR.org, 4/8/21 ([link removed]) , 7/29/21 ([link removed]) , 8/25/21 ([link removed]) ), playing upon xenophobic stereotypes of Asians as disease-carriers (Salon, 2/6/20 ([link removed]) ) and as robots brainwashed by their government.

Even in the years prior to the Covid outbreak, Fox News was spreading anti-Asian—particularly anti-Chinese—sentiment. In 2016, the Fox News segment Watters’ World (
10/3/16) featured Fox personality Jesse Watters conducting on-the-street "interviews" with New York City Chinatown residents, ostensibly to mock them for their lack of knowledge regarding US/China relations as discussed in the 2016 presidential debates. From the “Kung Fu Fighting” background music, to Watters asking his sources if they knew karate (a Japanese martial art) and questioning whether their watches were stolen, the piece was five straight minutes of blatant racist stereotyping thinly veiled as cheap humor.

Like bullies in the lunchroom deriding another child’s food, Murdoch's outlets employed the stereotype of Asian cuisine being unclean as a common—and juvenile—trope to scapegoat the Chinese for Covid. Watters’ anti-Chinese racism predictably ramped up at the start of the outbreak in 2020, when on Fox’s The Five (3/2/20 ([link removed]) ), Watters asked for a “formal apology'' from “the Chinese,” insisting Covid originated in China “because they have these markets where they are eating raw bats and snakes.” He linked the disgust such stories evoke to a red-baiting agenda:

They are a very hungry people. The Chinese Communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked. It's unsafe, and that is why scientists believe that's where it originated.

NY Post: Revolting video shows woman devouring bat amid coronavirus outbreak

The New York Post (1/23/20 ([link removed]) ) misidentifies a gross-out video as being taken "amid [the] coronavirus outbreak."

“Revolting Video Shows Woman Devouring Bat Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” read a January 2020 New York Post headline (1/23/20 ([link removed]) ), linking a viral image of a woman eating a bat to the Covid outbreak. The article describes the clip as “gag-inducing,” explaining that “the deadly disease reportedly originated at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market, which sold civets, snakes and other illegal exotic animals that had been infected by bats.” It didn't matter that according to the woman in the video, it was filmed the summer prior to the outbreak, or that a second bat-soup video referenced in the Post article was apparently taken in Indonesia's Palau, not China (France 24, 3/2/20 ([link removed]) ).

The Wall Street Journal that condemned the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes is the same paper that on multiple occasions has itself conflated Covid with China. In 2020, the Journal called China “the real sick man of Asia” (2/3/20 ([link removed]) ), used what it called "the Communist coronavirus" to criticize China’s government (1/29/20 ([link removed]) ), referred to the virus as the "Wuhan Coronavirus" (1/29/20 ([link removed]) ) and falsely ([link removed]) accused the Chinese government of stalling investigations into the evidence-free Wuhan lab leak theory (2/12/21 ([link removed]) , 5/23/21
([link removed]) ).


** Normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric
------------------------------------------------------------

Murdoch’s outlets have also played a significant role in normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric, despite their eager conflation of any criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. In 2012, Murdoch himself tweeted ([link removed]) about purported irony of the “Jewish-owned press” being (in his mind) anti-Israel, evoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that an elite Jewish cabal controls media (Extra!, 9–10/96 ([link removed]) ).

Fox News blames the left and Palestinian solidarity for a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. “US Seeing Wave of ‘Textbook Antisemitism’ Amid Israel/Gaza Tensions,” warned one Fox headline (5/21/21 ([link removed]) ). “The incidents fly in the face of those trying to distinguish between anti-Israel and antisemitic bromides,” the piece said.
Fox News: Dennis Prager: Israel-Palestine conflict is not what Left wants you to believe, it’s not over land

Right-wing talkshow host Dennis Prager told Fox News (5/21/21 ([link removed]) ) that the "Middle East dispute" is because "a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state."

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager joined Fox News Primetime (5/21/21 ([link removed]) ) to discuss the rise in attacks:

This is not what the left wants you to believe. They want you to believe it's over land. No, it's not. There is a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state beginning with, of course, Iran. That is why if you look at the rhetoric, it's always "F the Jews," "F the Jews" in all of these attacks. It's never "F the Israelis." It's always "F the Jews.”

But attributing a rise in antisemitic hate crimes mainly to left-wing anti-Zionism is more politically useful than substantiated. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests the majority of antisemitic attacks come from white supremacist groups.

ADL's most recent numbers are from 2019 ([link removed]) , during which there were 2,107 recorded attacks. There were 171 incidents in which attackers mentioned Israel or Zionism, and 68 of those were propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups (ADL, 2019 ([link removed]) ). Out of 270 incidents carried out by known extremist groups, two-thirds of those groups were white supremacist.

Certainly, antisemitism does appear on the left as well as the right, and there are activists who shout “Free Palestine” and “Death to Jews” ([link removed]) in the same breath, and use the word "Zionism" not as the name of an ideology but as a codeword for Jewishness. But Murdoch outlets consistently blur the line between criticizing Israel, or supporting Palestinian rights, and antisemitism. When Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid wore a necklace with the word “Palestine” on it, Fox (1/16/22 ([link removed]) ) reported the model was accused of "perpetuating antisemitic tropes"—referring to a tweet Hadid had posted condemning "Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid ([link removed]) over the Palestinian
people."


** 'A complicated web'
------------------------------------------------------------
Fox News: George Soros, 'the puppet master'

Fox News (12/14/21) took down a cartoon depicting George Soros as "the puppet master" behind progressive DAs and attorneys general after complaints ([link removed]) that such imagery "contributes to the normalization of antisemitism."

Murdoch outlets stop short of condemning antisemitism when it benefits their anti–police reform agendas. Blaming Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for the election of progressive “soft on crime” district attorneys throughout the country, they evoked images of a wealthy Jewish cabal pulling strings behind the scenes (FAIR.org, 1/14/22 ([link removed]) ). “Soros Funnels Cash Through a Complicated Web,” explained a New York Post piece (12/16/21 ([link removed]) ).

In late 2021, Fox removed a Soros “puppet master” cartoon from its social media after being called out for evoking antisemitic imagery (Ha’aretz, 12/16/21 ([link removed]) ; FAIR.org 1/14/22 ([link removed]) ).

Fox star Tucker Carlson has also accused Soros of “waging a kind of war—political, social and demographic war—on the West,” in his recent documentary, Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization (Fox News, 1/26/22 ([link removed]) ).

In an interview with Watters about the documentary, Carlson said Soros is seeking to create a society that is “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive” (Fox News, 1/25/22 ([link removed]) ).

This anti-Soros rhetoric sounds eerily similar to that of Robert Bower, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting ([link removed]) suspect who allegedly killed 11 people during Shabbat services in 2018. Bower (Washington Post, 10/28/18 ([link removed]) ) once tweeted:

Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.

Also a target of the “puppet master” trope: Michael Bloomberg. In 2020, Fox News anchor Raymond Arroyo described the billionaire and former New York City mayor, who is Jewish, as a “Biden puppet master” (Fox News, 3/5/20 ([link removed]) ). The comments sparked backlash from the ADL, which contended ([link removed]) that the use of the trope, even unintentionally, played a role in mainstreaming antisemitism.


** 'Jews will not replace us'
------------------------------------------------------------
Fox: Border Mess

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/21/21) said Democrats want “to change the racial mix of the country”: “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries” (Media Matters, 9/23/21 ([link removed]) ).

In October, Jewish groups condemned Carlson’s defense of “Replacement Theory ([link removed]) ” (Daily Beast, 4/9/21 ([link removed]) )—the idea that immigrants and people of color are entering the US to reduce the political power of white Americans (Media Matters for America, 4/8/21 ([link removed]) ; FAIR.org, 10/20/21 ([link removed]) ). The theory is linked to antisemitism because it's often claimed an elite Jewish cabal is leading the replacement. A popular conspiracy theory in 2018 claimed Soros himself was organizing the caravan of Central American migrants to the US border (Washington Post, 10/28/18
([link removed]) ).

Among Carlson’s fan-base are a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where “Jews will not replace us” was a prominent chant. Facing a lawsuit for taking part in the deadly demonstration while serving time in prison for an unrelated crime, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell ([link removed]) reportedly watched Carlson with other white supremacists to prepare for the trial, according to a former inmate (BuzzFeed News, 10/28/21 ([link removed]) ). Cantwell also mentioned Carlson in court documents, saying his trial was intended to silence white supremacists and those who agree with them, “even on peripheral issues.” He went on:

This is evidenced by the president of the United States, and the second most popular show in cable news (Tucker Carlson) being branded as "white nationalists" on account of sharing a small number of our views on the pressing issues of our time.

Neither Carlson nor Fox has commented on the neo-Nazi endorsement of the show.

Carlson has also downplayed the January 6 insurrection, whose participants included Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, asserting that it was not an act of terrorism (Fox News, 1/7/22 ([link removed]) ). On hand for what Carlson (7/7/21 ([link removed]) ) described as a "fake" insurrection "where elderly people showed up with signs on the Capitol" were Tim Gionet ([link removed]) , a livestreamer known as Baked Alaska who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories online; the Nationalist Social Club
([link removed]) neo-Nazi group; a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt; and another wearing a shirt reading “6MWE,” which stands for “6 million wasn’t enough.”

In 2021, Fox News commentator Lara Logan ([link removed]) faced condemnation from Jewish advocacy groups for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly pseudoscientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners (Fox News, 11/30/21) ([link removed]) . “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline,” tweeted ([link removed]) the Auschwitz Museum in response. Neither Fox nor Logan apologized; in fact, Logan retweeted ([link removed]) a defense of her comments.


** The answer? More police
------------------------------------------------------------

As FAIR (FAIR.org, 6/24/21 ([link removed]) ; CounterSpin, 10/7/21 ([link removed]) ) has reported in the past, using an uptick in certain crime categories to stoke fear of street crime allows corporate outlets to push a pro-police agenda, while blaming social justice, anti-police violence movements for crime.

In early February, Fox News (2/3/22 ([link removed]) ) reported on President Joe Biden’s visit to New York City and rejection of calls to defund the police, citing the city’s rise in crimes, including hate crimes:

Hate crimes also surged 72% in New York City last month, driven mostly by a 275% increase in crimes against Jewish people.

It's a trend that started last year, as hate crimes rose 96% in 2021 .

Framing the primary problem as crime and not hate allows hiring more police to be presented as the solution. And hate-mongering outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal don’t have to address their own antisemitism and anti-Asian racism.
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