The Fox Corporation at one time not only held an LGBTQ friendly employer status from the Human Rights Campaign, it proudly boasted about it. But the company this past April lost that status due to its increasingly bigoted and intentionally inflammatory coverage. “Fox’s June 1 segments attacking trans people continued this trend,” Media Matters reports. June 1, of course, is the start of LGBTQ Pride Month.
Media Matters reports that Lia Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania athlete who is also transgender, was “repeatedly misgendered” by contributor Katie Pavlich during a Fox and Friends appearance. Thomas was in fact the subject of transphobic attacks on at least three other Fox News programs. Media Matters said that on The Ingraham Angle, a guest “expressed opposition to the existence of trans children.” All of this on the first day of Pride alone.
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“Earlier this year, Fox aired 170 segments discussing trans people in just three weeks,” Media Matters continued. “Much of this coverage spread dangerous lies about the trans community and repeatedly invoked the long-debunked myth that trans people pose a threat to minors and seek to groom them. And Fox’s previous coverage vilifying Thomas included deadnaming her and even more misgendering of her.”
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Fox News has also been a major actor in promulgating “grooming” accusations against LGBTQ people. “Tucker Carlson recently wondered aloud why fathers aren’t storming classrooms and beating up teachers who talk about identity,” Daily Kos’ Marissa Higgins wrote in April. “Teachers pushing sex values on your third grader, why don’t you go in and thrash the teacher?” he falsely claimed at the time.
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LGBTQ activist and journalist Michelangelo Signorile in April detailed Carlson’s “pathological obsession” with gay people, including a disturbing incident while he was a student at Trinity College. Signorile noted a yearbook entry “listing the ‘Dan White Society’ as a club to which Carlson stated he belonged.” Dan White is the San Francisco elected official who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. “There is no Dan White Society, at least not any that any other student at Trinity listed as having been a member,” Signorile wrote.
Vanity Fair also in April reported that Fox Corporation’s LGBTQ employees were “fed up” with the “hateful” coverage. I mean, good that they’re mad about it, but it’s not like this is anything new. A separate report from Media Matters found that the propaganda network has been attacking the legally protected public school education of immigrant children for at least a decade now.
“In January, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade said the Biden administration is ‘poisoning these cities, and these towns, and these schools, with people that don't belong there,’ regarding people who recently crossed the border,” Media Matters reported. Once again, that fucking Fox and Friends. Kilmeade in particular really doesn’t like migrant children, also complaining about them during segments in September and October.
Then last month, the network obsessed about brown infants getting baby formula. But Fox News employees seemed to be okay with that. I guess its much easier to tolerate disgusting attacks when it doesn’t concern you.
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