Newsmax host: “Trump is still easily the most popular conservative candidate and is again running for president and Fox is pretending that he's not”
Published
Citation From the March 1, 2023, edition of Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight
ROB SCHMITT (HOST): We're going to start tonight with some media analysis. In court filings related to Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News, we learned that Fox's controlling shareholder, billionaire Rupert Murdoch, wanted to move away from Donald Trump as fast as he could after the 2020 election.
Now, if you still watch any Fox News today, that probably doesn't surprise you to hear that. Over the past couple of weeks, court filings from the case reveal internal emails at Fox, including some from Murdoch himself. Rupert claims Fox knew Trump's election claims were nonsense, but he says his hosts discussed them anyways, which he says he regrets. In one email, Rupert wrote to his son, saying he wanted Fox News to pivot away from Trump as fast as possible. And that's exactly what happened. Now Fox's viewers have the proof of that in writing, and so does the former president.
Trump firing back online: "Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers, who again will be leaving in droves - they already are."
Now, disputes in newsrooms are nothing new. Dominion and, of course, the big media behind them rooting for the end of conservative media are saying that Murdoch's criticisms of some of his own coverage showed that he knew Fox was doing the wrong thing.
In reality, it's quite the contrary. It shows that in any newsroom there are often differences on how to cover controversial stories. And Murdoch at that point, to his credit, was willing to give his hosts leeway in how they covered it. After all, the liberal media spent years speculating on whether Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired together to steal the 2016 American election because Hillary and the liberal deceptive intel community told them that he did.
Where Fox goes off the rails is deciding to stop covering Donald Trump at all because he made accusations that some higher-ups and hosts there didn't actually believe to be true. After the 2020 election, Trump was still the sitting President of the United States for a couple more months. The most powerful man alive. Anything he said, was newsworthy and worthy of analysis.
Today, Trump is still easily the most popular conservative candidate and is again running for president and Fox is pretending that he's not. We saw it last week when Trump went to East Palestine, Ohio to the delight of everybody that lived there. And Fox refused to take that live, analyzing some nonsensical story with the anchors instead.
Here at Newsmax, we cover all of it. We discuss all the candidates. We let you decide who you want to support. It's part of the reason why our competition is a bit worried about us. Shortly after the 2020 emails, Rupert emailed another executive about Newsmax writing, "these people should be watched." He's right about that.