`Lie after lie': Networks cut Trump speech
Several U.S. television networks cut away from a live speech by Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday evening after he repeated allegations that the election was being stolen from him.
CBS, ABC, NBC and MSNBC stopped airing the address, arguing his statements were baseless. The speech came as his leads in key states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia continued to dwindle. NBC's Lester Holt said on air: “We have to interrupt here because the president has made a number of false statements, including the notion that there has been fraudulent voting. There has been no evidence of that.”
Norah O'Donnell broke in on CBS to ask reporter Nancy Cordes to fact-check Trump's assertion that if “legal votes” were counted he would easily win the election. Cordes said there was no indication of a substantive number of illegal votes cast, and that a reference to votes arriving late was “another falsehood.”
CBS presenter John Dickerson said the president's speech “felt like kind of a deflated recitation.” And MSNBC cut to anchor Brian Williams, who said: “Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States but correcting the president of the United States. There are no illegal votes that we know of; there has been no Trump victory that we know of.”
USA Today also interrupted its website's live video feed. Nicole Carroll, editorin-chief, said: “Our job is to spread truth, not unfounded conspiracies.”
CNN and the conservative Fox News showed in full the 16-minute, 43-second speech. However, CNN ran a caption under Trump stating: “Without any evidence, Trump says he's being cheated.”
CNN's Anderson Cooper said Trump was “like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time was over.” Cooper's colleague Jake Tapper was equally withering: “What a sad night for the United States to hear their president say that — to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy in that way with this feast of falsehoods — lie after lie after lie. Pathetic.”
Even Fox News' support for Trump was at best halfhearted. While not ruling out the possibility of irregularities, commentators Bill Bennett and Byron York said it was up to the president's lawyers to present the evidence.
John Roberts, its White House correspondent, added: “What we saw tonight is a president who believes that at the end of the day, when all the votes are counted, the election is not going to go his way, so he's trying to plan an alternate route to retain the White House.” It was also reported Friday that Fox also instructed staff not to describe Biden as president-elect while Trump's legal challenges played out.