During Friday’s broadcast of Special Report with Bret Baier, an image was shown of how the stock market has jumped after outrage over the killing and assault of Black men, including the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Mo., police, the 1992 riots over the Rodney King verdict and the recent murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.
The social media backlash to the infographic was swift and significant, and Fox News eventually apologized for the graphic in a statement:
“The infographic used on Fox News Channel’s Special Report to illustrate market reactions to historic periods of civil unrest should have never aired on television without full context. We apologize for the insensitivity of the image and take this issue seriously.”
Baier himself tweeted out the network’s statement concerning the matter:
FOX NEWS CHANNEL:
“The infographic used on FOX News Channel’s Special Report to illustrate market reactions to historic periods of civil unrest should have never aired on television without full context.We apologize for the insensitivity of the image & take this issue seriously.”— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) June 6, 2020
Fox News isn’t the only outlet that has analyzed the trend of why the stock market oftentimes sees growth amid periods of civil turmoil. CNBC’s Jim Cramer recently explored the trend, saying that the stock market “doesn’t seem to care about social justice.”
The network informed us about a past Bloomberg article which has also explored the trend, as have journalists from Fortune, CNBC and The Wall Street Journal, the latter of which published a story with the headline: Stocks Are Rallying Despite Nationwide Protests. That’s Typical.