Fox promoted Jenna Ellis when she was spewing election-denying lies. Now that she has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case? Almost total crickets.
In case you missed it, Trump attorney Jenna Ellis made a tearful guilty plea in the Georgia case and threw Trump under the bus while she was at it yesterday.
Predictably, Ellis’ plea caused a meltdown in MAGA media. Media Matters reported that, “Some on the right are attacking Ellis for pleading guilty after soliciting donations to “fight” the case, while others are standing by her and dismissing the deal as a “Maoist struggle session.”
Fox News, on the other hand, has chosen to almost completely ignore the news. That’s pretty rich given Ellis’ history on the network.
According to a Media Matters review up to 3 PM, Fox News provided only about 3 minutes of coverage across 2 segments while Fox Business had not mentioned it at all. My personal, unscientific spot check found no coverage tonight, either.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz pointed out that Fox’s blind eye to Ellis’ guilty plea is especially noteworthy given that she promoted election lies on Fox News and Fox Business more than 20 times in the weeks following the 2020 election. That included lies about Dominion Voting Systems, the company that received a $787.5 settlement in its defamation case against Fox, in April.
Furthermore, documents made public in the Dominion suit reveal that Fox News hosts knew, as Laura Ingraham put it, that Ellis’ efforts were “a f**king joke,” Gertz noted.
Fox has worked furiously to discredit the Trump prosecutions. The network has even smeared the New York judge in Trump’s civil fraud case on his behalf after he was gagged from doing so. The fact that Fox pundits don’t want to talk about Ellis suggests that they can’t (yet) come up with a way to profitably spin her guilty plea.
CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote about Ellis’ plea, which came on the heels of guilty pleas by Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell in the same case, “Trump's allies are learning that the fact-free alternate universe of right-wing media where they shot to stardom stands in stark contrast to the facts-only world of the legal system. … The question is, how long can Trump himself outrun the truth?”
In any event, it’s further proof, in case you needed any, that Fox “News” is a propaganda outfit that deliberately misleads the public with the word “News” in its name.
(Ellis image via Crooks and Liars screenshot)