The Fox Moment—A Day of Journalistic Infamy 

For half a century the fight over presidential prime-time addresses has been a fight about carriage: does the network give up the hour or not? Every president has lost that fight at least once. 

CBS and NBC refused Gerald Ford in 1975. The big three passed on George H.W. Bush in 1992. In 2001, ABC alone carried George W. Bush’s speech to firefighters and police. In 2014, all four broadcast networks declined Barack Obama on immigration — too “overtly political,” a network executive told Politico — and Univision delayed the Latin Grammys to carry it instead. In 2022, ABC ran a game show while Joe Biden spoke in front of Independence Hall. 

So when ABC and NBC passed on President Trump’s July 16 address and CNN declined to take it live, they had fifty years of precedent behind them. I think they were wrong. I will not pretend they were first. 

What Fox News Corporation did that night was first. After it aired the speech, it pulled down the iron censorship curtain. 

The day before the address, Ralph Giordano, Fox Business’s programming chief, sent this to producers: “Hi — We don’t want to promote it or push to the speech at all. We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.”  

The same instruction allegedly went to Fox News producers and talent. It allegedly came from Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media. 

You do not need the paperwork to see this censorship directive was carried out. “Fox & Friends” ran three hours the next morning without a single mention of a presidential address the network itself had broadcast live twelve hours earlier. Crickets the rest of the day across the Fox diaspora. 

The closest precedent to such extraordinary censorship also belongs to Fox. In early 2023, Howard Kurtz told his viewers the company had forbidden him from covering the Dominion lawsuit — as part of an organization being sued, he could not. He disagreed and complied.  

That was a corporation in a legal crouch, suppressing coverage of a case against itself. Ugly, but comprehensible. 

This is different in both kind and magnitude. A news division was ordered not to discuss a sitting president’s prime time address to the nation. I can find no instance of this Fox Moment in the history of American broadcasting.  

Networks have refused presidents the microphone. Until July 16, no network had handed a president the microphone and then gagged its own anchors, guests, and reporters about what he said into it.  That is the Fox Moment that will live in infamy—as will Fox CEO Suzanne Scott who allegedly orchestrated the censorship. 

Just what did Fox viewers miss a discussion of?  The fact, revealed by President Trump, that the People’s Republic of China —America’s greatest existential threat — has vast capabilities to interfere with America’s elections.   

To put this most simply, Beijing now may well have the ability to override, or simply erase, your vote — and determine who our next president will be and which party will control the House and Senate.   

This is certainly information every American needs to know — and it is certainly a revelation that every news organization worth its First Amendment rights should go out of its way to debate and discuss.  Of course, Fox, in its moment of censorship, did not. 

The broader issue is this: When a president gives an issue prime time, that is news whether or not you like the president.   

In advance of the speech, CBS’s Tony Dokoupil told his audience that much of what the president has said on the subject of election integrity is false.  CBS carried it anyway, because “it will be news, and it is our job to cover the news.” 

That’s the answer to a presidential address network executives believe is unsupported. Air it and then let the anchors, reports, and guests argue with and about it.  

Fox stands alone in this “Fox Moment” as the only network to ever censor any discussion following a presidential address.  It is a moment in media and political history that should never be repeated.  And the people responsible for that Fox Moment should be held accountable — by Fox itself.