Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

From today’s Washington Post:

Fox News cut away from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s remarks at a news conference Monday evening because she claimed without evidence that Democrats were inviting fraud and illegal voting.

“There is only one party in America trying to keep observers out of the count room, and that party, my friends, is the Democrat Party,” she said, adding, “You don’t oppose an audit of the vote because you want an accurate count. … You take these positions because you are welcoming fraud and you are welcoming illegal voting.”

From the Fox News studio, anchor Neil Cavuto cut in to end Fox’s broadcast of the video feed from the Republican National Committee headquarters. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “I just think we have to be very clear that she’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”

He continued: “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. If she does bring proof of that, of course we’ll take you back. So far she has started saying right at the outset — welcoming fraud, welcoming illegal voting. Not so fast.”

The decision to cut away was Cavuto’s, not an edict from Fox’s top brass, according to people familiar with the show’s decision.

Fox has occasionally cut away from McEnany briefings in the past but notably did not do so even during the lengthiest of President Trump’s coronavirus task force briefings, when Trump took the lectern and veered away from information about the pandemic and straight into political messaging.

The move Monday came amid heightened attention on Fox News, whose decision desk was the first to call the state of Arizona for former vice president Joe Biden on election night, incurring the wrath of the president. The close relationship the network has long enjoyed with the president has cooled in the weeks since Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls Fox News, started telling associates that he predicted Trump would lose the election.”

McEnany would go on to say at Monday’s news conference that Republican poll watchers were barred from observing the counting, an allegation that Fox News reporter Eric Shawn, who had been reporting from Philadelphia during the counting, refuted on air numerous times last week, including at one point showing a photograph of the view a poll watcher could see. “That’s not true,” Shawn told host Dana Perino on air about such an allegation by Trump. “That’s not true. That’s just not true.”

Read the complete article here.

By Editor