Fox News Viewers: ‘You Can’t Handle The Truth’

Cutting away is not telling it like it is

, --July 25, 2020

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Violence and Destruction by Protestors in PortlandToo bad the good people of Portland, Oregon, worried about the violence in their city, can’t simply cut away from it the way Fox News did today. But they can’t because the violence that’s taken over their home city has been playing out for the better part of almost two months and is getting worse. No matter how violent or profane, the news is the news, and that’s what White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tried to show to White House Press Corps reporters in her press briefing today. “Fox News cut away on Friday from a White House briefing when Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany showed footage of violent demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, because the video included images of profane graffiti on a federal courthouse. “(Breitbart, July 24, 2020) Many folk are used to the signature graffiti left on federal buildings by Black Lives Matter, Antifa and are in fact sickened by it.
“We were not expecting that video, and our management here at Fox News has decided we will pull away from that at this time,” said anchor Harris Faulkner. (Breitbart) “Faulkner returned to airing the briefing once McEnany started taking questions from the press corps. At the end of the hour, Faulkner said the network had not been aware McEnany planned to show the video. Faulkner suggested she preferred to be given a heads up for violent and profane content.”
Since when did news networks presume the rights to heads up for violent and profane content from videos shown at White House press briefings? Aren’t most protests, claimed by the Democrats to be “peaceful”, violent and profane? What’s “peaceful” about protests where innocent people are abused and where businesses are destroyed? What happened to a major network like Fox News’ ability to bleep out profanity? Why couldn’t Fox simply have cut away from the offensive graffiti on display and continue on with the coverage of the profanity on video by talking over it? Surely it wasn’t to keep Ms. McEnany from making her point to White House reporters?
“Democrats have maintained that the riots in Portland were “peaceful protests.” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti claimed Thursday that the rioters in Portland represented “the best of our democratic ideals.” (Breitbart)
“Protesters in the video loudly shouted expletives, and one protester even expressed her wish that police officers would die.” (Washington Examiner, July 24, 2020) Today wasn’t the first Fox News cut away from something they did not seem to want to report. Just a little more than a week ago, Fox News host Neil Cavuto used the cut away tactic: “Thursday, Fox News host Neil Cavuto cut away during a speech by President Donald Trump on deregulation to fact-check his claims that former President Barack Obama had enacted “job-destroying regulations.” (Breitbart) (Canada Free Press, July 16, 2020)
“Cavuto said, “I do want to clarify a couple of things he said, that no president in history has cut regulations as much as he has. That is true. I think he might have mischaracterized the regulations that were added under Barack Obama — they were largely financial related. You might recall we had this little thing called the financial meltdown, and much of those regulations were geared to preventing banks from ever investing in things like risky mortgage securities, pooling them, selling them off.” “He continued, “The unemployment rate did, under Barack Obama, go down from a high of 10% to around 4.7%. President Trump, of course, sent that even lower, eventually getting us down to a 3.5% unemployment rate. But I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that during those eight years when Obama first came into office, and we were bleeding about a million jobs a month that that was standard fare and that characterized the whole eight years.” “He added, “It was not a disaster under Barack Obama. Not only did the Dow essentially triple during his tenure, but whether you want to call the increase regulations and other things that police financial companies, as a bane to our existence, those companies did very well. Americans did very, very well. So I just want to put that in some context here.”
Reporting on the violence of the protesters in Portland is part of the job for any news outlet. Cutting away is not telling it like it is. As Canada Free Press cartoonist Dag Barkley points out about the latest Fox News cutaway: “The (Fox News) management felt you’re not allowed to see the truth of what is really happening.“

White House Briefing with Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany



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Judi McLeod—— -- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.