MSNBC's Chris Hayes highlights Fox News’ laughable attempt to distract from reports of Donald Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein
Hayes: “Yesterday alone, they mentioned the ex-president more than 120 times, which is three times as much as they talked about Epstein”
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From the July 23, 2025, edition of MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): A little after 6PM today, three hours after that Wall Street Journal first broke the story, Fox News decided to mention the reporting from its sister publication. For most of the afternoon, while the rest of the world was talking about Epstein, Fox did multiple segments on New York City radical mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani -- they really like that -- whose primary victory happened a month ago, ran a few hit pieces on Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia graduate student detained by ICE for his protected free speech activity, it covered the sentencing of Idaho killer Brian Kohberger, and the network even took more than half an hour of Trump's speech at an AI summit in Washington live.
Fox's biggest story, though, was the one Trump has ordered his supporters to talk about instead. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's ginned up report about President Obama. Not an isolated incident, either. According to a new analysis from Media Matters for America, Fox has spent significantly more time talking about Obama than Epstein over the last few days. Yesterday alone, they mentioned the ex-president more than 120 times, which is three times as much as they talked about Epstein. Outside of Fox, the MAGA world reaction to this reporting from the Journal has been mixed.
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Fox News is no longer the sole gatekeeper for the right-wing media ecosystem. The story is out there, whether they like it or not. It has been for a while, at least going back to last month, when FBI Director Kash Patel was forced to avoid a question about Elon Musk's claim that Trump is in the Epstein files, the month after Patel told Trump he was in the Epstein files.