'Not entitled to his own set of facts': Fox News cuts away from Trump rally to correct him

23 February 2024

Even Fox News has become more hesitant to broadcast former President Donald Trump's false statements.

On Friday, host Neil Cavuto suddenly cut away from a Trump campaign rally in South Carolina to correct the record on some of his claims — particularly about the economy and the 2020 presidential election. During his speech, Trump took credit for recent stock market surges, suggesting that it meant investors were bullish about his return to the White House should he win in November. He also repeated his baseless assertion that he was the true winner of the last election.

"Even though the former president is entitled to his opinions, he's not entitled to his own set of facts," Cavuto said. "The market has indeed been going up, but nothing having to do with him... So that, whether you want to give [President Joe] Biden credit for that, it has nothing to do with Donald Trump. Furthermore, he mentioned gas prices 'out of whack' at six dollars a gallon, the national average right now is $3.26 a gallon."

"He went on to talk about the 2020 election and how that was 'rigged,' this has been adjudicated many many times, dozens of times, it's been investigated... some of them by judges that were picked by Donald Trump himself that found no evidence of that in the seven battleground states where most of them were focused. Donald Trump lost each and every one of those states."

Fox News' reticence about not challenging Trump's falsehoods on the airwaves may stem from its 2023 settlement with voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems, in which the two parties agreed that the network would pay nearly $800 million over its hosts' false claims about the integrity of Dominion's machines. Fox News is also currently litigating a separate lawsuit by voting software company Smartmatic, which is seeking more than $2 billion in damages.

Several emails that emerged during the Dominion case showed that even as some of Fox News' primetime hosts told their audiences that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, they expressed skepticism about Trump's claims in private emails between colleagues. Host Maria Bartiromo called an email from then-Trump attorney Sidney Powell "kooky," and primetime host Sean Hannity privately said that then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was "acting like an insane person." Former Fox host Tucker Carlson privately texted that the claims about Dominion were "shockingly reckless."

"Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It's insane," Carlson told fellow host Laura Ingraham. "It's unbelievably offensive to me."

Watch Cavuto's fact-check below, or by clicking this link.

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