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TThe announcement of a Joe Biden victory on Saturday morning exacerbated an internal conflict in the conservative media, in which Fox News in particular has been criticized by a flotilla of smaller, angrier and pro-Trump media.
The conservative cable news channel, which angered Trumpists by calling Arizona for Biden before any other network, has come under attack from the president and his most ardent supporters, who have seen Fox’s refusal to distort the truth about voting as a betrayal.
Trump’s dismay over the call was reportedly expressed at the highest levels, with Trump himself complaining to Rupert Murdoch, who supported the network’s coverage.
Writing in the conspiracy center WND Saturday morning, attorney Larry Klayman, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “pathologically litigious,” wrote: “Don’t be fooled by the twists of Fox News or other mainstream conservative media “which, as usual, harbor false hopes that the legal system will correct the errors that occurred on November 3”.
Within the media bubble on the right, adding “mainstream” to the description of any medium is talking about struggle, and “conservative current” amounts to an accusation of treason.
On the Trumpist website American Greatness, the site’s prolific opinionist Christopher Gage was furious: “I’m not sure what they think they are doing, or who they think they are, or if they know their game is up and they are enjoying one last spasm. of falsehood, but Fox News is not the electoral college, nor is it the supreme court. “
Later, after Fox diligently reported on the AP call, Trump supporter Breitbart News reluctantly listed them, along with CNN and MSNBC, as one of the “corporate media outlets” that had called for the election of Biden.
At the conspiratorial-minded Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft assimilated “Faux FOX” to the “Alphabet Media” media, which together had carried out a “coordinated attack on the president while he was playing golf.”
Other News Corp outlets appeared to pile on Trump during the week, including the New York Post, which characterized a meandering speech from Trump on Thursday as “dejected,” and correctly described his claims about voter fraud as “unfounded.” Throughout October, the same newspaper, almost the only one among the major outlets, had retailed the widely criticized story based on an alleged copy of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
What was at stake on election night for Trump was a narrative he had been preparing beforehand: a closed and “rigged” election, the outcome of which he hoped to have determined in his favor by friendly courts. The pro-Trump post-election media resented the Decision Table for undermining its attempts to mobilize supporters of the president to disrupt pending counts in disputed states.
For many of these outlets, their preferred tool was a torrent of misinformation encouraging the idea that the elections had been stolen. By Saturday, a series of stories alleging that isolated (and expected) failures in the voting machine were evidence that Democrats had orchestrated the theft of elections were published on PJ Media, Infowars and WND.
Meanwhile, wizarding con artists like Mike Coudrey (formerly known as “Mike Tokes”) urged Trump loyalists to mobilize to protest “EVERY STATE CAPITOL” in an effort inelegantly marketed as “#stopthesteal.” (On Wednesday, his advisers told Trump that his own demand to “stop the count” would instantly cost him the election.)
Fox News, for the most part, didn’t play along. His White House reporter, John Roberts, held out the “possibility” on Friday morning that the president will award a loss “for the preservation of democracy and the unity of the nation.”
On Saturday, they hosted a parade of guests, including prominent Republicans like Karl Rove, who backed the AP screening, further isolating the president and his supporters. (Other conservative establishment media, such as the National Review, also followed Fox’s lead in acknowledging the reality of Biden’s victory.)
It is worth noting that the network was not entirely unanimous in its message that Trump had lost the election. On Friday night, Tucker Carlson hosted Darren Beattie, the founder of the Revolver website and a former Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 for attending an event alongside white nationalists.
Carlson allowed Beattie, whose website was a key vector for Hunter Biden’s “Pizzagating,” to claim that the post-election situation in the United States was a “very specific kind of hit … a ‘Color Revolution.’ “, coordinated by a lawyer within the” national security apparatus. “
But other presenters appeared to be speaking directly to the president, a regular Fox News viewer, and gently trying to disappoint him. At Ingraham Angle on Friday night, host Laura Ingraham delivered a slavish account of Trump’s alleged accomplishments. But then he seemed to appeal to the president’s vanity and the tatters of his supporters’ belief in the legitimacy of the political process.
“Losing, if that’s what happens, it’s horrible. But President Trump’s legacy will only be more meaningful if he focuses on moving the country forward. And then the love and respect his fans feel for him will only grow stronger. ” She urged him to accept defeat with “grace and composure.”
If it impressed the president, it was not obvious in his tweets on Saturday morning, nor in a statement he issued in which he stated, with little foundation, that the elections were “far from over.”
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