MAGA-friendly TV channel Newsmax is throwing shade at Fox News for tiptoeing around the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Anchor Rob Schmitt suggested that Fox News hosts are “terrified” to cover MAGA’s uproar over the Trump administration’s decision not to release any more information on the late convicted sex offender.
“They don’t want to lose their audience and they don’t want to p--- off the White House at the same time,” he said. “So it becomes a bit of a catch-22.”
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By 4 p.m. Tuesday, Fox News mentioned “Epstein” just four times on Monday, compared to 42 mentions of “Biden,” according to Matthew Gertz, a fellow at the progressive media watchdog Media Matters. On Monday, there were eight “Epstein” mentions to 158 for “Biden,” Gertz noted.
Schmitt, who served as a Fox News host himself until 2020, remarked on the conservative network’s noticeable pivot, pointing out that it had offered “very consistent coverage” of the Epstein saga until recently.
“It’s pretty obvious that a lot of people don’t really know what to do with this,” Schmitt said. “There’s a lot of people that are very scared, because it’s clear that the White House didn’t want this to be a subject.”
Trump over the weekend pleaded with his allies to forget about Epstein—his former friend—telling them not to “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
Schmitt noted that Fox News’ Laura Ingraham “basically went dark on the subject” during her Monday night show, during which, he said, she mentioned it “only with disdain for about two seconds.”
He rolled a clip in which Ingraham made a passing reference to “conservative influencers eating their own.”
“That was it,” Schmitt said. “There was a little bit of it on Bret Baier’s show, Special Report. Otherwise, it was completely blacked out of the network. That came from somewhere—obviously, there’s a pressure point, and it was hit.”
Former prosecutor Alex Acosta, who negotiated Epstein’s notoriously lenient 2007 plea deal, currently sits on Newsmax’s board.
The deal allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges that could have landed him in prison for life. The financier, accused of sexually abusing underage girls, served just 13 months in a state prison on state prostitution charges.
Acosta later served as Labor secretary in the first Trump administration, but he resigned in July 2019 amid renewed scrutiny of the deal.
Last week, it was announced that Newsmax was partnering with Trump Media & Technology Group–which was founded by the president in 2021 and operates Truth Social–to launch a new streaming service, Truth+.
Trump Media’s CEO and Chairman Devin Nunes said the platform would “bring (Newsmax’s) unique programming to major new markets” and lay the “groundwork to challenge the woke news monolith with hard-hitting, non-woke reporting and commentary.”
