Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier appeared on today’s episode of Outnumbered, where one of the first issues discussed was the big New York Times report on President Donald Trump’s taxes. Baier dismissed the political impact of the report (without actually describing much of the report’s content for Fox’s audience).



Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway then asserted that Trump’s taxes just show him doing a lot of things that “probably all of us” do. She then suggested that there was coordination between The New York Times and the Biden campaign to push this story out. As noted by The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, neither Baier not Harris Faulker, another Fox “straight news” anchor, corrected her or even pushed back on the assertion:

Here's one of ads the Biden campaign released shortly after 10 p.m. EDT, a few hours after the Times story went live:

In reality, some stock footage combined with generic text is stunningly easy to make, and the video probably took just a few minutes to produce. Just because the Biden campaign can turn out professionally produced videos in a matter of hours doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy; it’s just good production work. (If anything, I’d personally wager that it took longer for the campaign to settle on messaging for the video than to actually make the video itself.)

This “the Biden campaign made a video fast so it must be a conspiracy!” claim is a tremendously stupid narrative among far-right media figures. It speaks volumes that no one at Fox News is willing to call it for what it is.