Fox News Responds After Its Chyron Labeled Joe Biden A “Wannabe Dictator” During Donald Trump Speech; White House Reacts With Dig At Network’s Dominion Settlement — Update
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UPDATE, with comment from White House: Fox News has responded to the attention its coverage of former President Donald Trump’s speech got last night, when a chyron called President Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator.”
“The chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed,” a Fox News spokesperson said on Wednesday. The network did not elaborate on how the chyron ended up on the air.
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The chyron appeared just before 9 p.m. ET, at the end of the hour devoted to Fox News Tonight. As the network went to a split screen of Trump’s post-arraignment speech from Bedminster, NJ and President Joe Biden’s speech at the White House, the chyron read, “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” Although it only briefly appeared on screen, it was quickly flagged by media and political reporters on Twitter. Fox News Tonight, the successor to Tucker Carlson after his show was dropped by the network in April, is set up to be an opinion show, but the chyron appeared as part of a Fox News Alert label to connote breaking news events.
Fox News carried the speech live, CNN and MSNBC did not. Commercial broadcast networks also stayed with their primetime programming.
At the press briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “So there are probably about 787 million things that I can say about this that was wrong about what we saw last night, but I don’t think I am going to get into it.”
Her reference to 787 million was to the dollar amount that Fox News paid to Dominion Voting Systems in their defamation case last April. Dominion accused Fox News of knowingly airing false claims that the company rigged the 2020 presidential election.
Fox News had been carrying the briefing, but cut away after Jean-Pierre’s remark. Anchor John Roberts sighed, then went on to another story.
PREVIOUSLY: CNN and MSNBC decided to skip live carriage of former President Donald Trump’s post-arraignment speech Tuesday night, leaving Fox News as the only major cable news network to cover it live.
Fox News not only carried the entire speech, but at one point the network went to a split screen of President Joe Biden speaking at the White House and Trump in Bedminster, NJ. The network’s chyron read, “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
Trump on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to a 37-count indictment in which he is accused of concealing materials containing top national secrets and attempting to obstruct federal officials efforts to retrieve them.
Fox News’s coverage came during Fox News Tonight, the replacement program after the network pulled Tucker Carlson off the air. The show, featuring a rotating series of hosts, has drawn roughly half the viewers that Carlson got. Brian Kilmeade, who is hosting this week, notably went to the Bedminster speech by telling viewers, “This is the president of the United States” about to speak to supporters.
In the speech, Trump blasted special prosecutor Jack Smith and aired a long list of grievances while making the claim that Biden is behind the charges against him. In fact, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special prosecutor to investigate Trump, and also appointed a special prosecutor to probe Biden’s retention of classified documents.
Earlier in the evening, when Trump arrived at his Bedminster club to give the speech, CNN’s Anderson Cooper explained to viewers, “We are not going to take it live, but we’ll monitor it” with anything that might be newsworthy. Anchor Jake Tapper said that they bypassed live carriage of the speech because “frankly he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told viewers: “There is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things. We are here to bring you the news. It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them.”
After Trump’s arraignment in April on New York state felony charges, both Fox News and CNN carried the speech, though the latter cut away shortly before it ended. Last month, CNN faced intense internal strife after the network featured Trump at a town hall, where he went into a volley of falsehoods and unfounded claims. CEO Chris Licht, who championed the town hall, was let go last week and replaced by an interim leadership team.
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Back in April, Maddow made similar comments in explaining to viewers why the network wasn’t taking that address live.
On Tuesday, Maddow added: “We take our responsibility seriously. We revisit decisions like this all the time. We make the best call that we can in real time every time. But tonight our call is this: We will monitor that speech by the newly indicted former president. We will not carry his remarks live. If he says anything newsworthy, we promise we will turn that right around to bring it back to you.”
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Maddow, Nicolle Wallace and Joy Reid were anchoring a primetime special focusing on Trump’s arraignment and went with legal and political analysis instead of the speech.
CNN featured Tapper’s interview with John Dean and Carl Bernstein as they compared Watergate to the present moment, as a former president running to return to office attacks the legal system as illegitimate.
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CNN later showed excerpts of the speech, but Tapper prefaced it by telling viewers that Trump makes “untrue and unfounded claims about the charges against him and the people he thinks are behind it.” He said that in the clip, Trump did talk about what could be part of his defense.
Trump said: “This day will go down in infamy, and Joe Biden will forever be remembered as not only the most corrupt president in the history of our country, but perhaps even more importantly, the president who together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists tried to destroy American democracy. But they will fail, and we will win bigger and better.”
Trump went on to argue that the law in the case applied to the Presidential Records Act, not the Espionage Act. The President Records Act, Trump noted, was “civil, not criminal. I had every right to have these documents.”
Broadcast networks did not air the speech save for PBS, which livestreamed it on YouTube with a warning label, per Mediaite. The warning read that “inflammatory rhetoric from elected officials or people in power can prompt individual actors to commit acts of violence.”
As Trump spoke at Bedminster, Biden was speaking at a White House Juneteenth concert.
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