Trump Returns to Fox News to Spew Stolen Election Conspiracy — Which Fox News Then Ignored

Fox News made the significant programming decision to take former President Donald Trump’s CPAC speech live Saturday. Trump has not been on the network since September, and even his family surrogates, who have long been frequent guests and contributors, have been absent from the network.

To make matters stickier, Trump has embarked on a full-throated assault on the network, particularly targeting Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, in the wake of his sworn testimony in the Dominion defamation lawsuit against Fox News coming to light.

So seeing Trump give a speech on Fox News was newsworthy, as were his repeated claims that he was the victim of some made-up conspiracy. The former president said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].” He also said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

Again, he didn’t win the election, and there is zero proof that the democrats cheated on elections to the degree that it changed the outcome.

This sort of election denialism fantasy is now rote for Trump. But the public learned that Murdoch and many Fox News hosts considered this election denialism to be worthy of ridicule, without merit, total bullshit. That unbridled skepticism of Trump’s claims, while apparently pervasive in private, has been absent from the air at Fox News, save a few segments pushing back on his stolen election fantasy.

On the other hand, Fox News has been cautious (since the defamation lawsuits) to avoid falling back into the trap of covering the stolen election lies as credible. The network no longer has Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani on the air to spew fantastical claims of magical vote-contortion machines.

And then, Trump delivered his CPAC speech, which Fox News aired live. And as I predicted in a Friday column, he mostly avoided the anti-Fox vitriol he spews on social media. He did joke, at one point, that he hoped Fox wouldn’t cut away. They did not.

And for Fox News viewers eager to learn about how the election was stolen in 2020? They weren’t disappointed, as Trump reiterated many of the baseless claims he has made in the years since.

Airing the false claims of a former president may not get Fox in any more legal trouble. But as a news organization that claims to abide by journalistic standards? They have an obligation to inform their viewers that the litany of false claims they just delivered to them are indeed false.

On that front, they failed miserably.

(It should be noted that Fox excels at fact-checking when the president in question is a Democrat. The network fact-checked Biden’s claim over the weekend that he was a civil rights activist.)

Since Trump’s CPAC speech aired, not one news reporter or anchor on the network has corrected the record or pointed out the simple fact that Trump’s claims were false. Immediately after Trump finished his speech, Jon Scott threw to Mark Meredith, who reported from the hotel ballroom where Trump spoke and said that he “didn’t necessarily hear a ton of new information.”

True, there wasn’t a ton of new information. Still, Trump hammered the stolen election conspiracy, which, despite being complete lunacy, he has repeated so many times that most Republicans have come to actually believe it.

This is the same dangerous and feckless precedent of the “ignoring the bully in hopes he goes away” strategy. I wrote in a column recently that, two years later, Fox News still hasn’t entirely come clean about Trump’s election denialism. This was a golden opportunity for the network to correct the record again, but sadly, it was missed.

Yes, these are political comments, but given the, you know, ATTACK on the Capitol that this rhetoric led to two years ago? The nation would be well served if the top-rated and most influential cable news outlet reported the truth without fear or favor.

But it’s clear that Fox News is still afraid of offending the Trump base, or as former Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg said recently on CNN, Fox tells its viewers what it wants to hear and not what it needs to hear.

Fox News ratings are way up in the two years since it placed third in January 2021, partly because of the smart business decision to refuse to call out Trump’s election denialism. But, as it turns out, putting profit over principle? It’s awful for the country. And it might cost Fox News $1.6 billion in defamation penalties.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.