Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer fumed on Tuesday over the right-wing network’s rivals opting to not air Donald Trump’s primary victory speeches in full, demanding they “take news out of your name” for doing so.
Hemmer’s broadside against CNN and MSNBC came as the “hard news” anchor also accused the conservative cable giant’s rivals of exhibiting “Trump Derangement Syndrome” following the Supreme Court ruling against Colorado’s Trump ballot ban.
During an appearance on the midday panel show Outnumbered, Hemmer groused that the other cable networks had been unfair to the GOP frontrunner by cutting off his live speeches in order to fact-check the infamously truth-averse ex-president. At the same time, he insisted that Fox News has always treated President Joe Biden fairly.
“You know, during our primary coverage tonight, if Joe Biden, as president of the United States, decided he wants to come out and take a speech, we would take his speech,” Hemmer declared. “We would listen to what he has to say. But on primary night after primary night, our competition sometimes refuses to take the winner.”
He continued: “One of our competitors took four minutes, another took ten. If that’s what you’re going to do, take news out of your name because we should all be listening to these ideas and thoughts. And if Biden came out, we would take him and be fair to his message.”
Following Trump’s win in the Iowa GOP caucus, MSNBC refused to air any of the former president’s victory speech live, saying it was “not out of spite” but because there could be a cost to the network for “knowingly broadcasting untrue things.” This was, of course, a not-so-veiled shot at Fox News, which paid $787.5 million last year to settle a defamation lawsuit over its willful peddling of Trump’s “stolen election” lies to boost its sagging ratings.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, for his part, cut away from Trump’s Iowa address after he began railing about the border, noting that the ex-president had started “repeating his anti-immigrant rhetoric.” He also sparked on-set laughter when he quickly dumped out of Trump’s rambling remarks following the oral Supreme Court arguments in the Colorado ballot case, quipping that they’d “gotten all the legal analysis we’re going to get out of President Trump.”
While the two networks aired significantly more of Trump’s speech after he won the New Hampshire primary, both of them cut in with lengthy fact-checks after Trump began peddling falsehoods from the podium. Meanwhile, CNN and MSNBC came under fire from conservatives and Fox News for their editorial decisions, with Trump demanding the networks be pulled off the air for not broadcasting his speeches.
Fox News, for what it’s worth, has also pulled away from Trump’s live remarks recently. Last month, for instance, Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from the ex-president’s rally speech to correct Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. “I did have to say that even though the former president is entitled to his opinions, he’s not entitled to his own set of facts,” Cavuto flatly stated.
Additionally, the network has only recently made it a habit once again of giving the president a live platform on its airwaves. For nearly two years, the right-wing network would only air taped interviews with the ex-president and didn’t carry his rallies uninterrupted as in years past, likely due to the defamation litigation his election fraud conspiracies wrought.
