Last week Fox News attempted to revive long since dead horrors for its audience - the COVID-19 pandemic, outrage over a transgender athlete scandal that did NOT include a transgender athlete and commies, commies and more commies.
In late June the Supreme Court ruled that states were allowed to ban transgender athletes from K-12 and colligate sports programs for women and girls. This essentially barred transgender athletes from competing in women and girls’ sports in 29 states.
The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committee announced last July that it would ban transgender women from competing. Several other sports leagues followed suit including the International Cycling Union, World Aquatics, World Boxing Organization, World Athletics Council, and the National Athletics Council (NCAA).
Although the issue of transgender women and girls competing in women’s athletic competitions is not completely settled the SCOTUS case and athletic league bans have greatly reduced the likelihood of transgender women and girls dominating women’s sports.
Sophie Cunningham, a WNBA player, voiced support for barring transgender girls in an ESPN article in late July. Fox News acted as if Cunningham was the Rosa Parks of women’s basketball.
After the article was published Cunningham wasn’t fired or disciplined. An Adidas shoe she sponsored sold out in nearly 24 hours. She was praised and criticized for her statement with dueling protesters at some of her games.
Cunningham is entitled to her opinion of course, but the hysteria seemed displaced as there is no transgender athlete in the WNBA. Even before the SCOTUS ruling and other athletic league bans transgender athletes made up less than less than 0.002% (10/500,000) of US college athletes, and even fewer of recent Olympians (0.001%) identified as trans.
The hype and hysteria surrounding the Cunningham story is peak Fox News. The network knows that the bigotry and hatred of transgender people will keep its viewers interested in its programming while it ignores things like the affordability crisis, the war in Iran and the DOJ’s many efforts to coverup everything related to Jeffrey Epstein.
While the network whipped its audience into a frenzy about an imagined transgender takeover of the WNBA the network revived other cultural issue zombies such as rehashing disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and the new red scare.
One of the more amusing moments last week happened when Fox News immediately distanced itself from a story involving its former host Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
In a 20-page court filing, Pirro’s office wrote that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was the result of a “botched” renovation – “not vandalism”. Her office dropped criminal charges on four people connected to incidents involving the tourist attraction.
President Trump was outraged insisting there was ‘tremendous vandalism’ at the site. Fox News did absolutely nothing to support its former host. The network did not acknowledge how it supported Trump’s false claims with surveillance footage that showed no criminal activity.
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