Frequent viewers of Fox News recently have noticed a growing dissonance between the news division and its opinion programming over the 2020 general election results. That dissonance was in full view on Saturday morning when Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth reported that there were was no significant voter fraud that would change the outcome, just seconds before announcing that he didn’t know if he believed it.
Oh, and he blamed the teleprompter for the report. C’mon man!
Of course, at issue is the ongoing legal battle and baseless claims of widespread voter fraud that have led President Donald Trump to claim that the election was stolen and allege that hundreds of thousands of votes were illegally switched from him to President-elect Joe Biden. While there have been isolated instances of voter irregularities, nothing yet has emerged that would come close to reversing the election results.
Fox News news programming has projected Biden to be President-elect. Still, opinion programming, such as Fox & Friends and primetime programming, is walking pretty lockstep with Trump’s claims that the results are not final until a thorough examination and all legal procedures have been extinguished. Thus far, the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have nearly all been dismissed by state and federal judges.
So it is in this context that Hegseth was reporting the news, clearly from a teleprompter from his remote location, in which he informed viewers of several pro-Trump rallies are
Right after that, Hegseth distanced himself from the news that he had just read, saying, “That was in the teleprompter. I read it. I don’t know if I even believe it.”
Hegseth’s immediate distancing himself from his own news report raises legitimate questions about either his own willful misinformation or that which he appears to spew on the decidedly pro-Trump opinion programs he regularly appears.
Watch above via Fox News.