The announcement of a Joe Biden victory on Saturday morning exacerbated an internal conflict in conservative media, in which Fox News in particular has been singled out for criticism by a flotilla of smaller, angrier, pro-Trump outlets.
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The conservative cable news channel, which angered Trumpists by calling Arizona for Biden before any other network, has been subject to attacks from the president and his most fervent supporters, who have seen Fox’s refusal to distort the truth about the vote count as a betrayal.
Reportedly, Trumpist dismay at the call was voiced at the highest levels, with Trump himself calling in a complaint to Rupert Murdoch, who stood by the network’s coverage.
Writing in conspiracist hub WND on Saturday morning, attorney Larry Klayman – who the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “pathologically litigious” – wrote: “Do not be fooled by the gyrations of Fox News or other ‘mainstream’ so-called conservative media, which are, as usual, holding out false hope that the legal system will right the wrongs that occurred on 3 November.”
Inside the rightwing media bubble, appending “mainstream” to a description of any outlet is fighting talk, and “mainstream conservative” is tantamount to an accusations of treason.
On Trumpist website American Greatness, the site’s prolific opinionista Christopher Gage fumed: “I’m not sure what they think they are doing, nor who think they are, nor whether they know their game is up and they’re enjoying one last spasm of untruth, but Fox News is not the electoral college, nor is it the supreme court.”
Later, after AP’s call was dutifully reported by Fox, pro-Trump Breitbart News sulkily listed them, along with CNN and MSNBC, as one of the “corporate media outlets” that had called the election for Biden.
On the conspiracy-minded Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft likewise assimilated “Faux FOX” to the “Alphabet Media” outlets which together had carried out a “coordinated attack against the president as he was out golfing”.
Other News Corp outlets appeared to pile on to Trump during the week, including the New York Post, which characterized a meandering Trump speech on Thursday as “downcast”, and correctly described his claims about election fraud as “baseless”. Throughout October, the same newspaper, almost alone among mainstream outlets, had retailed the widely criticized story based on a supposed 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 in advance: a close and “rigged” election, whose result he hoped to have determined in his favor by friendly courts. Post-election, pro-Trump media resented the Decision Desk for undermining their attempts to mobilize the president’s supporters to disrupt outstanding counts in contested states.
For many of these outlets, their preferred tool was a torrent of disinformation encouraging the idea that the election had been stolen. By Saturday, a stream of stories alleging that isolated (and expected) voter machine glitches were evidence that Democrats had orchestrated election theft were published on PJ Media, Infowars and WND.
Meanwhile, Maga-world grifters such as Mike Coudrey (formerly known as “Mike Tokes”) urged Trump loyalists to mobilize for protests at “EVERY STATE CAPITOL” in an effort inelegantly marketed as “#stopthesteal”. (On Wednesday, Trump was told by his advisers that his own demand to “stop the count” would instantly cost him the election).
Fox News, for the most part, did not play along. Their White House reporter, John Roberts, held out the “chance” on Friday morning that the president may concede a loss “for the preservation of democracy and the unity of the nation”.
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The moment Fox News projected Joe Biden will win 2020 presidential election – video
On Saturday, they featured a parade of guests, including prominent Republicans like Karl Rove, who each endorsed the AP projection, further isolating the president and his supporters. (Other establishment conservative outlets 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 wholly 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 the “Pizzagating” of Hunter Biden, to assert that the post-election situation in the US was a “very specific kind of coup … a ‘Color Revolution’”, being coordinated by a lawyer inside the “national security apparatus”.
But other hosts appeared to be speaking directly to the president – a habitual Fox News viewer – and attempting to let him down gently. On Friday night’s Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham set out an obsequious account of Trump’s supposed achievements. But she then appeared to appeal to the president’s vanity and the shreds of his supporters’ belief in the legitimacy of the political process.
“Losing, if that’s what happens, is awful. But President Trump’s legacy will only become more significant if he focuses on moving the country forward. And then, the love and respect his supporters feel for him is only going to grow stronger”. She urged him to accept defeat with “grace and composure”.
If it made an impression on the president, it was not evident in his tweets on Saturday morning, nor in a statement he issued asserting – with little basis – that the election was “far from over”.
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