While Fox News and CNN carried President Trump’s Thursday news conference uninterrupted, the broadcast networks took a completely different approach to the president’s remarks.
During the news conference, the president claimed that fraud had taken place in the presidential election, which seemed to be the cue to break away from the president for the networks.
About five minutes into the president’s remarks, Lester Holt, anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” cut in and said, “We have to interrupt here because the president made a number of false statements including the notion that there’s been fraudulent voting. There has been no evidence of that allegation by his campaign.”
Moments later, ABC and CBS followed suit, as they also claimed to be providing a fact-check to the president’s comments.
On CNBC, former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith also broke into the president’s remarks, saying that he was taking the unprecedented step because what Trump was saying “in large part, was absolutely untrue.”
MSNBC was actually the first to cut away, as the network interrupted the coverage around two minutes in as MSNBC anchor Brian Williams said, “Okay, 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.”
Back in 2015, it was Williams who was interrupted by NBC when it placed him on a six-month suspension for fabricating and embellishing stories over his years of working for the network.
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