Fox News ridiculed over 'War on Thanksgiving' segment

'I got viscerally angry because to me this is the latest attempt to tear down an American tradition,' says guest

Fox News has accused progressives in America of trying to “cancel” Thanksgiving, apparently based on a single article which noted the climate impact of the upcoming holiday.

The right-wing network seized upon the story, ‘The environmental impact of your Thanksgiving dinner’, which was published last week.

Although the piece in the Huffington Post is actually an examination of the carbon footprint of various parts of the Thanksgiving traditional meal, plus the travel made by the 50 million Americans to visit family, a series of Fox News shows decried it as the start of a new “War on Thanksgiving”.

“Cancel culture has turned on the holiday,” one host, Todd Piro, raged as he introduced a segment on the article.

“Now when I heard this, all joking aside, I got viscerally angry because to me this is the latest attempt to tear down an American tradition.”

The overblown row was quickly picked up by other Fox News shows, with evening host Tucker Carlson also commenting on the story.

“The left isn’t just demanding you give up steak dinners and plastic straws, now over at the Huffington Post – which really is the most ludicrous site on the internet – they are demanding you cancel Thanksgiving dinner too," he said.

“Cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes are bad for the planet, said the unhappy rich kids who work at HuffPo.”

In reality, the author of the HuffPost article, Alexandra Emanuelli, clearly stated in the piece “No one should be discouraged from enjoying the holiday or celebrating with family and friends”, and instead wrote she wished to provide information on how to switch to ingredients which inflicted less damage on the environment.

Dozens of people online have ridiculed the network’s efforts to whip up misleading fury among Americans.

Parker Molloy, who works for the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters, said: "All of this is just amazing. Someone wrote a blog post that was like "Hey, here are some tips if you're looking to reduce your carbon footprint this Thanksgiving," and Fox has been going on about it for three days now, misrepresenting it as an attack on Thanksgiving as a whole.

"The goal of segments like these, picking *these* stories and framing them in *this* way, is to plant seeds of resentment among its viewers, to make them feel like they're under attack."

Aaron Rupar, a journalist with the news website Vox, tweeted a video of one of the segments and described it as "completely beyond parody".

Others accused the network of being "snowflakes" or easily "triggered", mimicking the language often used by Fox News to describe leftists.

During another segment on the morning show Fox and Friends, known to be Donald Trump’s favourite programme, the internet personalities Diamond and Silk also weighed in.

“I get tired of people that have lived their life and have eaten meat telling us not to eat meat,” Diamond, whose real name is Lynette Hardaway, said. “Don’t tell us what we can and cannot eat.

“If you have a problem with climate change, stop driving cars ⁠— ride on your horse to work. You do everything you can to fix the climate, but don’t infringe upon my right to have Thanksgiving with my family.”

Fox News and other right-wing media outlets in the United States have repeatedly reported supposed attempts to minimise and even eradicate Christmas, although little genuine evidence of this supposed anti-Christian campaign has emerged.

But Thanksgiving has also been dragged into the culture wars, most notably over its complicated historical roots in a meal shared between indigenous Americans and settlers from England in 1621.

Some on the left have argued the traditional story which celebrates how Native Americans shared their food with the Pilgrims during a harsh winter obscures the reality of how the arrival of Europeans decimated indigenous culture and populations.