In his primetime address, President Trump alleged China meddled in the 2020 presidential election and announced the White House was releasing declassified documents as evidence.
“Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history,” President Trump said.
Curtis Houck, of the Media Research Center, was monitoring the left-leaning news networks to gauge their reaction.
On venerable ABC, which did not air the speech on its main network, Houck advises anchors spent lots of on-air minutes telling their audience the president made false statements in his address.
“Okay,” Houck counters, “something's not true. Can you say why it's not true?”
The issue of voting and fair elections is a sensitive one for both sides, Democrats and Republicans, with views on voting that are miles apart.
Among many Republicans, their view is Democrats willingly cheat to win — and do so frequently — and hence Republicans support voter I.D., and passing the SAVE America Act, to clamp down on fraud.
On their side, many Democrats say any legal obstacle to casting a ballot, such as voter I.D., is a Jim Crow-like tactic by racist Republicans to keep voters, especially minorities, from participating in Election Day.
President Trump, who is routinely described as a fascist, Hitler-like figure among Democrats, hasn't helped himself and the Republican Party by telling the news media the midterm elections should be cancelled.
On CNN, liberal anchor Kaitlan Collins told its audience CNN would monitor the president's speech.
"But we aren't taking it live, given the President has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections," Collins announced.
Ironically enough, a visibly angry Hillary Clinton and her allies have repeatedly questioned the 2016 election results and blamed Trump’s surprise win on Russia helping him defeat her.
On the other two broadcast networks, NBC and CBS, Houck and MRC recorded those news anchors and correspondents being a little more fair to the U.S. president. That fairness amounted to playing a clip of the speech for the audience and then disputing his claims.
On the issue of elections and voting, Houck says the Democratic Party’s belief is that questioning the 2020 election is akin to damaging democracy and borders on a traitorous act.
“The fact that the press hated, and they still do, the SAVE Act, the idea of voter I.D., is something that is still beyond the pale for these people,” he said.
