Fox News Blames Biden For SolarWinds Hack … That Happened Under Trump
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Anyone who has watched Fox News in the past couple of days has heard one clear narrative on repeat: the United States is going to hell in a handbasket under President Joe Biden, and there’s virtually nothing we can do but be angry and vote in the next midterms.
The ominous examples cited as reasons for this outrage are familiar tropes for right-of-center opinion shows, but recently have also become something of a sole focus of the news programming, presuming one abides by the differentiation of the two types of shows on cable news these days.
A good example of this blame Biden approach—which is rating well with viewers given Fox’s recent return to dominance—is cybersecurity failings under this administration, illustrated by the Colonial Pipeline hack earlier this week of course, that major SolarWinds hack from a while back.
Thing is? The massive SolarWinds hack, which was reported as a much larger breach than anything we’ve ever seen before, actually happened under the Trump administration and not under Biden’s.
That hasn’t kept Fox News from making unfair smears against the current administration, however. Case in point the following breathless headline on FoxNews.com: “America under siege on Biden’s watch as cyberattackers cripple the country.” The sturm and drang article opens:
They cut off a pipeline to the Eastern Seaboard for days, tried to poison a Florida water-treatment plant, held hospital IT systems hostage and stole an undetermined trove of information in the SolarWinds hack – all as the Biden administration searches for a way to respond.”
Looking closely, you see very clever wordplay. It doesn’t technically say that SolarWinds was hacked during Biden’s first term. Rather the “trove of information” was stolen as the Biden administration searches for a way to respond. And to be fair, the specifics are laid out in great detail later in the piece, and the SolarWinds hack is noted to have occurred in 2020. But all of it is presented as though cybersecurity is a problem unique to the Biden administration, overlooking all that has occurred since 2016. Coincidence?
So it’s just one article on FoxNews.com. What’s the big deal, right? Well, I read the article above as a result of Fox News’s digital team using a push notification to alert me (and presumably millions of other Americans) about just how incompetent Biden is, at least in the eyes of that story’s writer. Or how cybersecurity is a brand new challenge with which only the current administration has struggled.
Now, Fox News presenting critical coverage of a Democratic president isn’t terribly new. It’s very much in its DNA. The constant criticism of Bill Clinton is what differentiated them at launch, and attacking Barack Obama’s politics coincided with their rise to the political media ecosystem. It’s nothing new, and in fairness, Fox’s competitors CNN and MSNBC sold a lot of soap in the past four years, treating the Trump administration in the least charitable way also.
There is no question that the DarkSide ransomware hack of the Colonial Pipeline is a major story, particularly given the gas shortages (and also unreasonable hoarding) it engendered. But the Solar Winds hack was so massive that experts at the time compared it to Pearl Harbor.
To their credit, Fox News covered the Solar Winds hack. In the week that followed that news breaking, the story was mentioned 18 times on Fox News airwaves according to television transcript database TVEyes. By comparison, however, Fox News has mentioned Colonial Pipeline 94 times in the two days that followed the breaking of this story.
There are good reasons for the disparity, namely the everyday impact that the latter caused in terms of gas shortages. But the Solar Winds hack remains a massive story. And despite the clear and perhaps misleading suggestion by Fox News, it occurred under the Trump administration, and not Biden.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
