‘KILLING IT’

Meghan McCain Defends Fox News Pushing Fake Stories

‘The View’ host dismissed multiple instances of conservative media going wild for false stories while complaining that liberals ignore Hunter Biden.

You would think that any reasonable person would agree that repeatedly pushing demonstrably false stories on the most-watched cable news outlet is not a good thing. But when the person is Meghan McCain and the network is Fox News, that is apparently not the case.

“The last guy in the White House loved to accuse the mainstream media of pushing fake news, but it kind of looks like some of his most supportive conservative outlets are guilty of doing that very thing—again,” Whoopi Goldberg said at the top of The View on Wednesday morning, referring to the story about Biden allegedly trying to take away Americans’ burgers that Fox News hammered for days before ultimately issuing a retraction.

Fox stars also repeatedly pushed the fake story that federal officials were giving migrant children copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’ children's book, which originated in the New York Post and led to the resignation of a longtime reporter who said she was “ordered” to write it.

Sunny Hostin called the retractions “too little, too late” and part of a larger “campaign of misinformation that keeps coming from these conservative outlets.” Sara Haines agreed that there “needs to be consequences that are harsh and immediate” for anchors who perpetuate such lies.

But McCain, who proudly declared herself the “only conservative woman in all of media,” said, “What I have found interesting in what I consider liberal media is not the stories we talk about, but the stories we don’t talk about.”

“For example, we never once talked about Hunter Biden as a ‘hot topic’ on this show, whereas Ivanka Trump or Donald Trump Jr. cough in the wrong directions and it probably would have taken up the first two blocks,” she continued. From there, she offered a plug for her husband, Ben Domenech, a Fox News contributor who also runs, in her words, “one of the most influential conservative websites on the internet,” The Federalist.

“The reason why these outlets need to exist is because everything else is liberal everywhere else,” McCain said. “There's a reason why Fox is killing it in the ratings and laps everyone else, because it seems like it’s rigged every place else!”

Instead of talking about two concrete instances of conservative media deliberately pushing unverified stories about the Biden administration over a span of several days, McCain said her show should cover “the things every day that are inaccurate on CNN and MSNBC and then we can talk about fairness in the media.”

She declined to list or highlight any specific examples from those networks.

Later, Joy Behar pushed back on McCain’s suggestion that The View ignored some legitimate scandal about Biden’s son. “The reason we didn’t discuss Hunter Biden on this show is because even though the New York Post pushed the story, it was actually never vetted or verified by various news outlets.”

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Matt WilsteinSenior Editor

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