By Ryan Mills
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
The day after the November election, Christina Bobb had
good news for viewers of the One America News Network: “President Trump won
four more years in office last night.”
His victory was “decisive,” said Bobb, a 35-year-old host
on the pro-Trump cable network, but there was a problem – Democratic leaders in
Michigan and Pennsylvania had stopped the vote counts. Why? “Because Trump is
clearly winning, and they need time to find more ballots.”
“The fact is, Donald Trump won a second term last night,”
Bobb insisted, even as Trump’s margins were evaporating in key states. But she
had an explanation for that. “Democrats are tossing Republican ballots,
harvesting fake ballots and delaying the results to create confusion.”
Never mind that the late votes being counted
overwhelmingly were mail-in ballots, which leaned heavily toward the Democrats
in 2020, or that they were coming from heavily Democratic cities, which tend to
be the last to finish counting due to their large populations and urban
inefficiency. The so-called “red mirage” election experts had been warning
about for months was to OANN clear evidence of cheating.
For the next two months, OANN and Newsmax – two fledgling
cable networks trying to outflank Fox News on the right – produced an almost
daily drumbeat of stories and headlines seemingly designed to sow doubt about
the integrity of the presidential election, and to encourage the fantasy that
Trump was the real winner.
Such material was, of course, also readily available on
Fox from Trump loyalists like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs. In early
January, Dobbs said on his show “we
still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone
knows were committed, that is defrauding other citizens who voted with
fraudulent votes.” But Fox has a robust news side that remained skeptical of
such wild claims.
A mid-January poll by Quinnipiac University found
that 73 percent of Republicans believe the November election was marred by
widespread voter fraud.
Since the riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on
January 6, there’s been soul-searching about how so many people could have been
so badly misled about the election.
Despite the pandemic that shifted much of the 2020 vote
to the mail, top government election officials declared November’s election
“the most secure in American history.” Investigations by the Justice Department
and the FBI found no evidence of widespread fraud. Trump’s legal challenges
were all flops, even before conservative judges he’d appointed. In several cases,
Trump’s lawyers withdrew claims that they could prove fraud. A signature audit
in Georgia found little evidence that people had voted illegally. There was no
Kraken.
Yet for two months after the election, OANN, Newsmax, and
others continued to pump out smoke about allegations of widespread fraud,
making it easier for Trump’s followers to believe there was an inferno.
Utilizing the Internet Archive, National Review reviewed the last two months of OANN’s
and Newsmax’s coverage leading up to the electoral vote count and the riot on
January 6. The review found that rarely did a day go by without the two outlets
publishing stories about alleged election fraud, often based on little more
than the questionable opinions of Trump sycophants like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney
Powell and L. Lin Wood, as well as D-and-E-list pro-Trump celebrities with
seemingly no expertise in voting security or presidential politics.
It’s hard to see what useful insights My Pillow’s Mike
Lindell could add to the conversation over election integrity, but both OANN
and Newsmax found his opinions newsworthy enough to base stories on. “Mike
Lindell to Newsmax TV: President Trump Will Prevail,” read a headline on
December 17. Newsmax also ran stories based solely on the political insights
of actor Scott Baio –
“Scott Baio to Newsmax TV: Hopes ‘Brave Judges’ Can Stop Election Theft” – and
even published a story in early December with the headline “Christian
Prophet Predicts Trump Will Win,” the kind of “journalism” more typically
associated with grocery store checkout lines.
The two networks gave credence to conspiracy theories,
including the baseless claim that Dominion voting machines changed Trump votes
to Biden, and published stories based on the work of known hucksters without
bothering to point out their histories of hucksterism.
Not everything the two networks published promoted the
election fraud narrative. They both regularly publish straight daily news
reports on a variety of national issues, and they do highlight some voices that
don’t toe the Trump line.
Newsmax ran stories about Chris Christie calling Trump’s
legal challenges “an absurdity,” and
about Jeb Bush, who tweeted in mid-December that “The election is over.” On
December 1, Newsmax published a story about Georgia elections official Gabriel
Sterling admonishing Trump and
the state’s two Republican senators over their claims that the election had
been mishandled.
But the voices promoting fraud were most prominent, and
appear to have been enticing to new viewers.
In fact, if there was one story that Newsmax found as
newsworthy as alleged election fraud, it was its own ratings.
Newsmax regularly used the breaking news bar at the top
of its website to tout its Nielsen ratings, and to take shots at Fox. “WOW!
Newsmax TV Beat Fox Business, CNBC Combined,” read a breaking news bar headline in
mid-November.
In a statement to National Review,
Newsmax denied that it intentionally sowed doubt about the integrity of the
election. “Newsmax has always reported on all sides of the news. We reported on
the electoral challenge claims made by President Trump, his attorneys and
others, often relating to court documents, about election issues and
irregularities. Newsmax has consistently stated we were not claiming any of
these to be true, and we reported on evidence challenging these claims,” the
statement read.
OANN President Charles Herring did not respond an email
from National Review.
The election fraud narrative on OANN and Newsmax began
even as votes were still being counted. On November 5, two days after the
election, when the vote counts in key swing states were finishing and
mainstream news outlets were preparing to call the election for Biden, OANN’s lead
headline read, “Trump Campaign: Victory Possible By Friday.” That story has
since been removed from the OANN website.
At about the same time, Newsmax ran a story announcing
that Dick Morris – the one-time Democratic, Bill Clinton political strategist turned
rightwing prognosticator turned Trump apologist – had declared the election a “setup.” The
Democratic Party had been involved in a conspiracy to rig the polls to disguise
the theft of the election, he said, offering no evidence.
“They knew they were likely to lose this election. So,
the first thing they did was to fake the polls that talked about how they were
going to win,” Morris explained. “And that was to set up the presumption that
Biden was going to win, so that when he won, based on fraud, everybody would
say, ‘Yeah, he was winning anyway.’”
In the two months after the election, Morris in
particular became a go-to voice for Newsmax, willing to spin conspiracy
theories and tell the Trump faithful what they wanted to hear.
He was a regular guest on Greg Kelly’s nightly show,
where the host – a one-time straight TV news anchor – became a leading defender
of Trump’s claims that the election was rigged.
Newsmax regularly ran headlines based only on Morris’
questionable hot takes.
“Dick Morris: Trump Can Still Win”
(Nov. 8); “Dick Morris to Newsmax TV:
Confident Election Stolen, Not About Fixing It” (Nov.
16); “Dick Morris to Newsmax TV: ‘Georgia
May Well Be Overturned’” (Nov. 18); “Dick Morris to Newsmax TV: Stats
Prove Ballot Stuffing” (Nov. 23); “Dick Morris to Newsmax TV: Texas
Lawsuit is ‘Brilliant’” (Dec. 9)
Heading into late November, weeks after every mainstream
news outlet and Fox News, too, had called the election for Biden, Newsmax and
OANN refused to do so.
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy explained that
his network wouldn’t call the race for Biden until Trump’s election challenges
in five states had been exhausted. He also cited alleged evidence of
“vote manipulation,” and the possibility some states could fail to certify
their electors.
“There have been clear-cut examples of voting
irregularities. State authorities took clear liberties with their mail-in
ballots and may have violated the law,” Ruddy wrote. “For example, Republicans
allege that in several counties Democrats blocked their ability to actually
observe and monitor the initial counting of mail-in ballots. And, across
several contested states, we saw strange patterns related to mail-in ballots.”
Ruddy has admitted that
the election fraud storyline has been “great for news,” and that Newsmax has an
editorial policy of being supportive of Trump and his policies.
Newsmax wouldn’t affirm Biden’s status as president-elect
until mid-December. In a tweet, OANN founder Robert Herring said his network
would not recognize Biden as president-elect until at least January 6, because
“all of our investigations indicate there was fraud in voting.”
Through December, Newsmax and OANN continued to highlight voices willing to
discredit the presidential election, and to report on alleged evidence of fraud
with little skepticism. OANN reported false claims by Lin Wood that “Trump Won
400 Electoral College Votes,” and Newsmax highlighted his insistence that “Trump Should Declare Martial Law”
after the Supreme Court declined to take up a Texas lawsuit challenging the
election results in several states.
They reported, often with little pushback, on Giuliani
and Powell’s conspiratorial claims that Dominion voting machines stole Trump
votes, and that “Evidence Ties Vote Machines to
Iran, China.”
In late November, OANN published an interview with a
rightwing activist in Colorado who claimed to have infiltrated an Antifa
conference call in the fall. He alleged, while providing no evidence, that on
the call a Dominion executive told the Antifa members they shouldn’t worry
about Trump winning re-election because “Trump is not going to win. I made
f-ing sure of that.”
The Dominion executive denied the accusations, and
claimed that after the OANN piece and others, he received death threats, and
was driven into hiding. He filed a defamation suit against
OANN, the Trump campaign, Giuliani and Powell, and media figures who spread the
story.
OANN also published a story stating that an alleged tech
expert named Jovan Pulitzer had “unveiled key vulnerabilities” in
Georgia’s voting machines. Pulitzer told a state assembly committee that he had
hacked into the state’s Dominion machines, even though state officials have
said the machines do not connect to the internet. Pulitzer provided no evidence
that he’d hacked the machines, and elections officials deemed his claims “patently false.”
Before testifying about Georgia’s election security,
Pulitzer’s previous claims to fame were being a failed treasure hunter and
inventing the CueCat, dubbed by PC World magazine as one of the “25 worst tech
products of all time.” OANN made no note of that in its reporting.
The two networks seemingly took the worst aspects of Fox
as a model. While some of the network’s reporters and anchors have helped to
debunk Trump’s voter fraud allegations, top opinion host Sean Hannity regularly
highlighted what he described as “serious claims” of
voting irregularities.
In late December, both Newsmax and Fox News aired
segments walking back their coverage of election fraud centered on voting
machines after they were threatened with legal action. In a statement on its
website, Newsmax said that “no evidence has been offered” that voting machine
technology companies Dominion or Smartmatic “used software or reprogrammed
software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.”
Last week, the American Thinker also issued an apology for
publishing “completely false” statements about Dominion that “have no basis in
fact.”
At one point in December, the lead story on Newsmax’s
website was actually about a piece from The Federalist. In the Federalist piece,
senior editor Mollie Hemingway claimed that security footage from a Georgia
ballot-counting location allegedly showing ballots being counted in secret
after poll watchers were told to go home “was not ‘debunked.’ Not even close.”
But additional reporting from local and national reporters showed
the boxes of ballots in question had, in fact, followed the proper chain of
custody, and that the poll watchers in question
mistakenly had thought vote counting was done for the night.
The Federalist, an online conservative magazine, also has
published several stories casting doubt on the integrity of the November
presidential election, including stories with headlines like “Yes, Democrats
Are Trying To Steal The Election in
Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania,” “We’re Supposed To Believe The GOP Had
a Great Election Night Except For President,”
and “5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election
Norms.”
Heading into late December and early January, as
lawmakers prepared and maneuvered before the official certification of Biden’s
victory, Newsmax and OANN continued to highlight voices willing to mislead
people about alleged fraud and Trump’s chances of overturning the election.
Morris insisted that Biden would be an “imposter”
president, and that Trump was winning the argument on voter fraud. Evangelist
Franklin Graham was featured in a Newsmax story, saying that when Trump alleges
the election was rigged or stolen, “I tend to believe him.”
“In 2020, Vote Fraud Claims Were Not ‘Baseless’”
according to a Newsmax story from
January 2. That same day, Ric Grenell, Trump’s former intelligence director,
told Newsmax that Trump was in a “really good position” for the challenge to
the Electoral College vote, adding that “everybody knows this election was full
of fraud.”
The next day, newly elected Georgia congresswoman
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, appeared on
Newsmax and said that challenging the Electoral College vote was “about truth and defending the
people’s vote.”
On January 4, Kelly on Newsmax interviewed Ohio
congressman Jim Jordan about the Republican strategy of objecting to the Electoral College
vote. “You’re on the ground,” Kelly said to Jordan.
“You’ve got Democratic colleagues. Are they a little bit nervous? Are they
saying ‘Oh boy, yeah, this is something and it could change?’”
That Wednesday, as lawmakers gathered to debate the
election results, and as Trump prepared to rally his supporters, Newsmax ran a headline claiming
that Vice President Mike “Pence Could Still Upend the Electoral Vote.” Like so
many other claims that the website had repeated and amplified, it was not true.
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