About those Jan. 6 texts

The House Jan. 6 committee has released a bunch of texts from the day of the Capitol riot given to them by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The texts that have gotten the most attention were sent to Meadows by three Fox News hosts, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade. As the riot raged, all urged Meadows to push President Donald Trump to make a forceful statement telling the rioters to leave the Capitol and end the violence.

Immediately after the texts were made public — read aloud at a committee meeting by Rep. Liz Cheney — some commentators used them to attack not Trump but the Fox hosts. The criticism was that the hosts were hypocrites because they privately recognized the destructiveness of the riot but downplayed it publicly. One commentator, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake, grossly mischaracterized what Ingraham had said in an effort to fit the facts into his preferred anti-Fox narrative.