Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham Offer ‘Updates’ But No Corrections After Hyping Debunked Nashville Covid ‘Cover-Up’ Story

Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham offered brief “updates” — but no official corrections — to a now fully-debunked story that they both had devoted five-minute long segments to on the previous Thursday night. That report in question, by a local Fox affiliate in Nashville, has since been completely retracted and the station has apologized for running it, but Carlson and Ingraham breezed by those details on Monday nights, with the former suggesting that political “pressure” might have been the real reason it was taken down.

“We told you last week about a story from a local news station in Nashville, Fox 17, about a series of emails between the mayor’s office there and the city health department,” Carlson said on Monday. “In those emails, they appear to discuss whether to release to the public the very low number of coronavirus cases connected to bars and restaurants. That story understandably attracted a lot of attention.”

The Fox host then deployed the euphemism “drama” and an artful walking around the facts to downplay what has in fact been a full dismantling of the original Fox17 report by both CNN and The Tennessean.

“Under pressure from the mayor’s office, Fox 17, the station, has pulled that story off its website The station is no longer reporting that the mayor’s office covered up the coronavirus numbers. It’s now been reported that some of those numbers were actually put out in August, though the public didn’t seem to know about them,” Carlson said. “The mayor’s office claims emails suggesting the cover-up were taken out of context. So we don’t know the truth about that because we don’t have all the emails, but we wanted to keep you up to date on what was happening there and of course we’ll bring you more as we learn more.”

Likewise, Ingraham acknowledged that the mayor’s office had released the supposedly hidden information, although she included a complaint from Fox17 about the station’s “concern about the lack of overall transparency from Cooper’s office.”

Notably, Carlson and Ingraham’s “updates” struck a much less contrite tone that network’s own morning show, Fox & Friends, where co-host Steve Doocy openly apologized on Monday for airing the false story last Friday morning, before the story was retracted.

Last Thursday, however, both Ingraham and Carlson were far more fired up. Ingraham hosted country star — and Nashville bar owner — John Rich, who blasted Cooper as the “de Blasio of the South” and accused him of deceiving the public. Carlson too attacked Cooper and other city officials, claiming they were caught “scheming” to hide public health data that, in reality, they had already released. “Hide all good news,” Carlson claimed was the Democratic mayor’s strategy, otherwise “fear might subside and our power along with it.”

At the end of last week’s segment, Carlson also played a clip of a press conference where Fox17 reporter Dennis Ferrier, who reported the story that was ultimately retracted, clashed with a spokesperson from the mayor’s office.

“Finally, a real reporter somewhere,” Carlson had said after the video ended, before then recommending that the spokesperson apologize for “lying” to the public.

Watch the videos above, via Fox News.