November 10, 2020, 7:30 am
As the Trump administration continues pushing completely unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud as a way to insist the president actually won his bid for reelection when he, in fact, did not, the media has had enough — even Fox News.
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White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany spoke to the press on Monday night, essentially serving as an echo to Trump’s tweets.
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“We want every legal vote to be counted, and we want every illegal vote to be discarded,” she said.
Fox cut the audio feed before she was even able to finish her sentence, and host Neil Cavuto took over to provide a much-needed disclaimer for the Fox News audience.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I just think we have to be very clear that she’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting,” he said. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this. I want to make sure that — maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating.”
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Those that still support Trump as he insists the election is being stolen from him have continuously positioned themselves as being champions of a fair and transparent election, insinuating, and sometimes outright saying, that anyone who disagrees with their demands for a recount or a change to what votes are counted, is anti-democracy.
In reality, the GOP has worked hard to suppress votes this year, doing everything from crippling the USPS to attempting to have some mail-in ballots discarded to attempting to enact voter ID laws that even judges concluded were intended to be discriminatory.
The conspiracy theories regarding voter fraud circulating from random social media pages have repeatedly been disproven, and courts have dismissed multiple lawsuits brought forth from the Trump campaign in the days following the election, because they simply have no proof that there has been foul play of any kind from the Democrats or Joe Biden’s campaign.
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But to see the notoriously ultra-rightwing network actually take a stand against the misinformation being peddled by Trump’s people — especially after four years of them (and other networks) refusing to cut away from the lies — seems to signal that Fox News may be cutting its losses with Trump now that he has lost.
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Fox News’s refusal to entertain these baseless claims from Trump’s people can only be seen as a good thing in this particular moment in time — the news media actually doing their job and not just allowing politicians to say whatever they want, unchecked, and regardless of the damage it may do.
But if only they would have done this four years ago, maybe we wouldn’t be fighting an uphill battle to convince Trump devotees that our election process is secure while the president insists he’s been cheated for no reason other than he cannot accept loss.
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Soon after McEnany’s press conference was cut short, Donald Trump took to Twitter to slam news networks—including Fox News—and accuse them of “election interference” and conducting “the worst polling ever.”
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*First Published: November 10, 2020, 7:30 am
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