Fox News Spent Hours On Target’s Pride Merch, Just Seconds On Church Child Sex Abuse Allegations

A new report from media watchdog group Media Matters revealed that Fox News dedicated more than 2 hours of hysterical coverage on the backlash to Target’s Pride Month displays, while running less than a half-minute of coverage on a new bombshell report detailing sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Illinois.

According to the report, the right-wing TV network spent two hours, 12 minutes, and 32 seconds covering the Target backlash between May 23 and May 30, coverage which included multiple Fox correspondents expressing outrage that Target would expose children to clothing with positive messages about the LGBTQ community.

While Fox repeatedly fearmongered about this supposed threat to children, the network almost completely ignored the horrifying reports of sexual abuse in the Illinois Catholic Church, airing only one segment on the attorney general’s report, according to Media Matters.

In fact, Fox devoted just 22 seconds of airtime to cover findings of an investigation conducted by the Illinois attorney general’s office accusing 451 clergy members from the Illinois Catholic Church of abusing nearly 2000 children in the state over a period spanning nearly 70 years. Those figures are significantly higher than the 103 individuals previously acknowledged by the church when the state’s review began in 2018.

During a press conference, Attorney General Kwame Raoul shared that investigators discovered cases of 1,997 children who had suffered abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy in Illinois between 1950 and 2019.

“Target is just the latest brand Fox has taken aim at in its anti-LGBTQ coverage, adding to attacks on Bud Light for its Dylan Mulvaney promotional content and Disney, which the network falsely accused of grooming and sexualizing children,” Media Matters reports. “The repeated targeting of pro-LGBTQ products and sentiments, thinly veiled as defenses of children’s innocence, fit into Fox and right-wing media’s larger homophobic campaign to conflate the LGBTQ community with grooming and child abuse.”