With more than 500 days until next November’s presidential election, Fox News host Jesse Watters has already seen enough to declare it neither free nor fair.
His reason: Other news networks won’t show enough of Donald Trump.
MSNBC and CNN both exercised discretion when it came to showing live footage of Trump after his arraignment Tuesday in a Miami federal court on 37 charges relating to alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago.
ADVERTISEMENT
When the now twice-indicted former president visited a Cuban restaurant, for instance, CNN anchor Jake Tapper told the network’s control room to stop showing it, saying, “He’s trying to turn it into a spectacle and into a campaign ad.” MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace made a similar comment at the time.
According to Watters, the media “panicked” because “they don’t want you to see that.”
“Crowds liking Trump, people praying with Trump, Trump buying fans lunch—you are not supposed to see that,” Watters said, implying that nearly all of Trump’s daily life was newsworthy.
Watters then addressed CNN and MSNBC’s decision not to air Trump’s speech that night from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.
“They call themselves news channels,” Watters complained. “You can’t censor one and let everybody else speak live.”
Fox News, by contrast, took Trump’s speech live—at one point even describing President Joe Biden in a much-derided chyron as a “wannabe dictator.”
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow explained at the time that “there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things”—a point she made in April after Trump’s first post-arraignment speech at Mar-a-Lago.
But Watters demanded more still. Even airing Trump’s speech alongside any sort of fact-check or counterbalancing graphic, like PBS did, is unacceptable. Their sidebar read: “Context: experts warn that inflammatory rhetoric from elected officials or people in power can prompt individual actors to commit acts of violence. Violent rhetoric has escalated in online forums and far-right militia groups since Trump’s federal indictment.”
Watters didn’t want to hear it.
“This is already not a free and fair election. The media is now hiding both presidential candidates from you,” he griped.
“They’re hiding Biden so you can’t evaluate him and they’re hiding Trump so you can’t be persuaded by him,” Watters said. “What kind of presidential election are we going to have where the American voter isn’t going to be able to see or hear from either candidate? The media has become the most dangerous thing in the United States. Beware of people who swear they’re only trying to protect you.”
