January 6 defendant David Brian Howard claims that Fox News played a significant role in his radicalization and eventual participation in the January 6 Capitol riot.
Howard was arrested on charges of breaching the Capitol and is set to face sentencing on Friday. According to court documents shared by CBS’s congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, Howard is “seeking mercy at sentencing” by noting that he was influenced by Fox News’s lies about the 2020 election.
The defendant “is/was simply a small-town man who between the years of 2014 and 2020 followed the media and news which much of his small community seemed to follow—Fox News,” the document read. While Howard “bought the lies sold to him and millions of others for many years and especially in the wake of the 2020 election,” the defense noted he has since had a change of heart, and is now “horrified by their ongoing misinformation, influence and affect and veers away from any of that.”
“Mr. Howard had no intention, ever, of engaging in the actions which led to his arrest. He came to Washington, DC, from Dallas (via Miami), on January 6th alone because he was led to believe—from his local media and large swaths of the community around him at home—that his vote for Mr. Trump in 2020 had been stolen; that the election had been stolen.”
Howard’s argument echoes that of critics who have placed some of the blame for the events of January 6 on Fox.
Media journalist Brian Stelter, for example, has argued that the Capitol riot was the culmination of “something that actually built up for months and months,” fed in no small part by the Big Lie narratives peddled by the conservative network. “We know that some rioters bought plane tickets and flew to Washington because of what they were being told on television, because of the lies that were being spread on television. I think it’s an underappreciated part of the story,” Stelter said on MSNBC in January.
