Fox News host slams networks that won’t air Trump’s lies uninterrupted

On Tuesday, during the Fox News daytime show “Outnumbered,” co-host Bill Hemmer angrily told CNN and MSNBC to “take the ‘news’ out of your name” because they’ve failed to air every moment of a multiply indicted, dictator-loving, self-described sexually assaulting presidential candidate’s screechy, lie-filled screeds about exterminating the liberal vermin who refuse to allow our country to heal from the tragic death of Ashli Babbitt.

After complaining about the “Trump derangement syndrome” the networks supposedly exhibited in the wake of the Supreme Court decision allowing Donald Trump back on the Colorado ballot, Hemmer whined that those networks refused to carry more than a few minutes of Trump’s recent primary victory speeches.

It must feel weird to be schooled on journalistic standards by a Fox News employee—even one who used to work at CNN. One imagines it would be a bit like a restaurateur getting a one-star Yelp review from a guy who sells roadkill and expired cans of Tab out of the back of his windowless white van.

But when you have 24 hours of airtime to fill and only 22 hours of regularly scheduled nonsense to fill it with, you have to riff a bit. Which means some of the nonsense inevitably comes off as somewhat less practiced and marginally more nonsensical.

Watch (the good stuff starts at :37):

Transcript!

Hemmer: “I just have one more thing here is that, during our primary coverage tonight, if Joe Biden as president of the United States decided he wanted to come out and take a speech, we would take his speech. We would have listened to what he has to say. But on primary night after primary night, our competition sometimes refuses to take the winner. South Carolina was a big deal, it was a big vote, it told us a lot about where the Republican Party is going this candidacy. One of our competitors took four minutes, another took 10. If that’s what you’re going to do, take news out of your name, because we should all be listening to these ideas and thoughts. And if Biden came out, we would take him and be fair to his message.”

Harris Faulkner: “Yeah, we do it all the time. … Sometimes we have to put words on the screen because helicopters are too loud for him or he’s having a moment. But we want to cover it; it’s news.”

Sure, Jan.

Honestly, Fox was lucky it wasn’t required to take the “News” out of its name as part of its $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which sued the network over the raft of election lies it floated in the wake of the 2020 election. But taking a news network to task over its attempt to end American democracy is pretty weak sauce. The real outrage is not letting a dictator-coddling, insurrectionist presidential candidate wax rhapsodic about his primary opponent’s tiny bird brain and the numerous times he’s been forced to show voter ID to buy his daily pain au chocolat loaf of Wonder Bread. 

Of course, nothing could be healthier for democracy than preventing candidates for high office from repeating easily disprovable lies ad nauseam without fact checks, but then Fox has long demonstrated it has no use for democracy. But news? They’re all about news. After all, it’s right there in their name. And they’d never consider muting President Joe Biden if he were talking about deadly electric boats or whale-murdering windmills.

If he wanted to talk about voting rights, democracy, or The Big Lie, on the other hand?

The Guardian, July 13, 2021:

The conservative-leaning network Fox News declined to air live President Joe Biden’s national address on voting rights, and instead only devoted a few minutes of coverage to the speech after it occurred.

On Tuesday, the network was the only major cable news channel in the US to not take the president’s address live; CNN and MSNBC both aired the speech in its entirety.

During his address, Mr Biden condemned the “big lie” spread by former President Donald Trump and a number of his allies – the false claim that Mr Biden “stole” the 2020 election, or that widespread fraud caused Mr Trump to lose.

So what did Fox run instead of Biden’s big speech? A discussion of Bill Gates’ divorce and a segment on possible COVID-19 vaccine side effects. You know … the news.

RELATED: CNN does it right, cutting off Trump in the middle of lie-riddled speech

But while there are ostensibly many reasons to take the “news” out of “Fox News,” by Hemmer’s own standard, Fox’s brand should be bleeding out on the abattoir floor. Last month, Fox anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from a Trump speech when Trump started lying about the thing that had already cost the network $787 million.

So either Cavuto actually cares about democracy and good, responsible journalism, or he has loads of News Corp. stock options. 

“[Trump] went on to talk about the 2020 election and how that was rigged,” said Cavuto. “This has been adjudicated many, many times—dozens of times. It’s been investigated by everyone and his uncle, no fewer than 44 investigations launched, some of them by judges that were picked by Donald Trump himself, that found no evidence of that in the seven battleground states where most of them were focused. … Donald Trump lost each and every one of those states, and no facts—or no history that he mentions on the stump right now—will change that.”

For comparison, here’s the cutaway (and fact-check) that Hemmer hated from MSNBC on Tuesday:

Meanwhile, as The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona writes, Fox News itself was long reluctant to carry Trump’s lies live, because they’re really fucking expensive, as Trump himself now knows.

Additionally, the network has only recently made it a habit once again of giving the president a live platform on its airwaves. For nearly two years, the right-wing network would only air taped interviews with the ex-president and didn’t carry his rallies uninterrupted as in years past, likely due to the defamation litigation his election fraud conspiracies wrought.

Translation: It’s dangerous to broadcast Trump’s provably false election lies, but it’s unpatriotic not to broadcast his other lies, because he’s the undisputed standard-bearer for one of our two major political parties, and dead whales are far less likely to sue news networks than are serially defamed voting machine companies.

Or something like that. Did you really tune in to a fake cable news channel expecting anything resembling sense?

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Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.