Disgusted John King Apologizes on CNN For Playing Tucker Carlson’s Narration of Brian Sicknick Video
CNN anchor John King repeatedly expressed regret as he played a clip of Tucker Carlson narrating a piece of video featuring fallen Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick from Carlson’s Monday night segment downplaying the Jan. 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Carlson was granted exclusive access to 41,000 hours of surveillance footage by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and on Monday night’s edition of his Fox News program, he began to roll out selected clips along with his own narration rewriting the history of the attack.
On Monday afternoon’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, King played a particularly tough-to-stomach snippet from the program, which has already drawn a searing condemnation from the Sicknick family, in which Carlson narrates while the late Officer Sicknick is shown onscreen.
King prefaced the clip with an apologetic acknowledgment of the family’s suffering and another apology at the end of the segment:
JOHN KING: So they want to rewrite, whitewash, wipe away, minimize the history of that day. You mentioned Officer Sicknick. I feel nervous doing this. I don’t like to do this. I don’t like to put families back through the pain they have suffered every time they see this video. But here is Tucker Carlson’s take on Officer Sicknick.
TUCKER CARLSON (NARRATION): By all appearances, Sicknick is healthy and vigorous. He’s wearing a helmet, so it’s hard to imagine he was killed by a head injury. Whatever happened to Brian Sicknick was very obviously not the result of violence he suffered at the entrance to the Capitol.
JOHN KING: Now we can show you some video of Officer Sicknick outside the Capitol where he was pepper sprayed or bear sprayed, as they call it. What he was trying there to hold the line before the line collapsed.
Yes. He went inside and he may have cleaned up and he may have gotten the sting out of his eyes, but he died the next day. The medical examiner says it was of natural causes, that he suffered a couple of strokes, but he died the very next day.
And his family says the Sicknick family is outraged. “The ongoing attack on our family by the unscrupulous and outright sleazy so-called news network of Fox News who will do the bidding of Trump or any of his sycophant followers. Every time the pain that day seems to have ebbed a bit, organizations like Fox rip our wounds wide open again, and we are frankly sick of it.”
NIIA-MALIKA HENDERSON: Yeah. I mean, it’s horrible for that family. It’s horrible for the officers who had to live through that to see this and this attempt to erase what they had to go through, the pain, the fear, the trauma of having to hold off that mob, they were vastly outnumbered. That’s why you see them sort of seeming to kind of have hands off with some of the folks who were there. But listen, this is exactly what Kevin McCarthy wanted. He wants this kind of rewritten. He wants it downplayed. And you see Donald Trump coming out saying because of Tucker Carlson’s lies about this, that everyone should be freed, who has been detained due to January 6.
JOHN KING: And again, to the Sicknick family and other side, don’t lightly re-air that video. We just think it is necessary to put the whitewash that you’re seeing into factual context. We’ll be right back.
Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.
