Fox News Segments Slam Media For Accurately Describing Italy’s New Prime Minister
Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader expected to become Italy’s first female prime minister, has found many defenders across right-wing media and on Fox News since winning 26 percent of the vote in the country’s parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Fox News ran multiple segments on Tuesday taking issue with the media calling out Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party for its historic ties to neo-fascist parties in Italy. Meloni was a member of the National Alliance from 1995 until 2009, a party that was born from the Italian Social Movement party – the heir to the banned National Fascist Party.
“Here’s how the media is reacting. CNN, ‘Italy’s most far-right prime minister since Mussolini.’ The Guardian talks about ‘Italy’s fascist adjacent Giorgia Meloni, a reminder that women can be just as awful as men.’ And it goes from there to NPR and Foreign Policy, ‘Italy’s far-right wins,’” said America’s Newsroom anchor Bill Hemmer on Tuesday reading some headlines covering Meloni.
Hemmer then turned to guest Byron York, a right-leaning columnist.
“Well, remember that a lot of commentators on the left have been calling a lot of people fascist in recent years, certainly since the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. That doesn’t make it so,” York said, having declared Meloni a “standard conservative” earlier in the discussion.
“Now, the other side has concerns that she has, we’re talking about social conservatives or cultural conservative concerns, is just the state of Italy and its role in Europe. I mean, countries don’t have real national sovereignty. And you’ve seen sort of nationalistic populist movements arise in Hungary and in Poland. We’ve seen maybe the beginnings in Sweden and now in Italy,” York continued.
Ironically, as York worked overtime to paint Meloni as an everyday conservative, a chyron on the bottom of the screen declared, “NEW PM MARKS ITALY’s 1ST FAR-RIGHT GOVT SINCE WWII.”
While the chyron seemed to have its facts straight, both Hemmer and York later praised Meloni for a speech she gave at the World Congress of Families gathering in 2019, which went viral on Monday as GOP leaders and right-wing pundits shared the clip praising Meloni.
In part of the clip, which Fox News showed, Meloni quotes G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, a British author and theologian of types, was regularly accused of anti-Semitism in his time for advocating that Jews are not the same race as Christians and should live in a separate society.
An hour later, America Reports anchor John Roberts referred to Meloni as a “hard right” candidate and noted that the Sweden Democrats Party that York mentioned was “formed by neo-Nazis and skinheads.”
Fox News host Steve Hilton defended Meloni later on in that show and slammed MSNBC for covering Meloni’s ties to Italy’s fascist past.
“Well, it’s amazing how they reach for that word almost instinctively and almost the most hilarious aspect of this, I have to say, was last night on MSNBC, I literally saw that sort of title for this election result in Italy was ‘Global Erosion of Democracy.’”
“So now a free election that is won by someone they don’t like is called an erosion of democracy. And it just goes to show how actually extreme the left and the right and the media supporters here in America have become, where anything that challenges their groupthink, their worldview, is now condemned as semi-fascism. As Biden said, this lady in Italy is now a fascist. It’s an erosion of democracy. If you don’t get the right result, anyone would think that actually they’re the ones that are moving in an authoritarian direction,” Hilton concluded.
Hilton’s commentary came the day after Fox’s top-rated host Tucker Carlson offered a full-throttled embrace of Meloni and brought on controversial Arizona GOP nominee for governor, Kari Lake, to defend her.
