Instead of acknowledging the truth about the misleading cheapfakes, host Martha MacCallum and guest Kayleigh McEnany defended them with more deceit.

As I wrote for Crooks and Liars earlier this week, MAGA media has been promoting cheapfake videos about President Joe Biden. They are clips taken out of context to make it look as though Biden is feeble and doddering. My post was specifically about cheapfakes of Biden at G7 which Murdoch media took directly from “RNC Research,” a Xitter account run by the Trump campaign. As MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski said in her commentary that accompanied my post, the cheapfake was delivered “right from Trump’s campaign, with no context, no double-checking it, no looking at very widely available, different angles, to tell the truth.”

There were others, too On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called out right-wing media for using the cheapfakes.

Fox responded by doubling down. The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona noted that Fox “aggressively rebuffed” Jean-Pierre, albeit with what could be described as a cheapfake excuse:

“These have not been cropped, they have not been sped up or slowed down or edited in any way,” Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum declared at one point on Tuesday morning.

MacCallum, supposedly a top journalist at Fox, was dissembling. She had to know that the issue is not manipulated video but misleading snippets taken out of context.

The poutrage continued on other shows, Baragona reported, and even media analyst Howard Kurtz joined in:

“Despite a couple of misleading headlines, Fox News has not shown any distorted video of Joe Biden, though some of its commentators who are paid for their opinions have talked about what they see as a fundamental decline,” Kurtz stated. “Now, the New York Post, owned by Fox’s sister company, intentionally or not, appeared to follow the RNC lead in running a front page cropped photo that seems to show at the G7, Joe Biden staring off into space when just a few feet away, but you can't see it in the picture are those skydivers who were just landed here. But there's a different kind of conflation going on here that, anything that you see now is manipulated by the media is false, is fake, is bogus, and that's flat out untrue.”

As if to further thumb her nose at the truth, on her afternoon show, MacCallum hosted Kayleigh McEnany to discuss the matter. Before she got her cushy job at Fox News, McEnany distinguished herself with such lies when she was Donald Trump’s White House press secretary that Fox’s own Neil Cavuto cut away from her November 9, 2020 press conference in which she told the kind of lies about the presidential election that cost her employer $787.5 million two and a half years later. The night Sean Hannity welcomed McEnany into the “Fox family,” in 2021, she lied about her lies.

On MacCallum’s The Story show, McEnany pretended – and MacCallum let her – that she had rigorously vetted her own briefing statements and that Jean-Pierre was the dupliciitous one.

MCENANY: I mean, I've sat there in the White House press secretary's office, you have this wood burning fireplace, you sit there with your aides, in my case for hours and hours and hours and people will bring up ideas or, you know, facts, graphs to prove the point you're trying to make at the podium and, and I can't imagine if an aide said to me, let's call this video of President Trump, Trump a cheapfake and me thinking it's a good idea to carry that to the podium, you would have been laughed out of the room. [CNN’s] Jim Acosta likely would have shouted me down.

So just the audacity to say what you were watching with your eyes, which, Martha, it’s very important your viewers understand these come from pull feeds, right? In some cases, the footage used is from White House feeds. These are not operatives hiding in the bushes. These are official channels for which we get information from the White House press corps.

Again, nobody is saying that the videos were doctored. They were misleadingly taken out of context.

MacCallum played a clip of Biden “sort of shouting back at reporters in the Oval Office” that she said, and McEnany agreed, was not “really so bad,” As if that proved their lack of bias.

Then MacCallum hyped a poll from May in which only 41% of voters thought Biden had the mental ability to serve effectively as president. Only 50% thought Trump did. Of course, neither women mentioned Trump shocking CEOs with his lack of mental ability, his bizarre ranting about sharks during a Las Vegas rally or waving to a non-existent crowd.

For even more disingenuousness, McEnany offered what she presented as helpful advice for Biden as to whether he should call Trump a “convicted criminal” during their debate next week.

MCENANY: I think for his campaign to do that, that's one thing. For it to be in an ad, they're leaning into the only thing that they have. I think it would be folly for President Biden, himself, to lean into the “convicted felon” language on the debate stage. President Trump will weaponize that immediately. He will come in and say, “See, I told you these were the Biden trials.” It would be a huge mistake for Biden, himself, to use that language. He might do it. Reporting I've read indicates he may. I just would advise against it because you're playing into Donald Trump's hand there.

I take this as an indication that Biden should call Trump a convicted felon.

You can watch this disgraceful example of news analysis below, from the June 18, 2024 The Story with Martha MacCallum.