The network was covering the news conference live, but cut off just as Ms. James was beginning to lay out the specific crimes the Trump family is accused of. “Some of it is really inside baseball unless it’s your tax dollars in New York,” Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner said. “And some might even accuse it of being political because we’re 48 days before the midterm elections.” He then added, without explanation: “Both presidents, the current one and the previous one, are certainly being considered to help the candidates.” Ms. Faulkner is known as one of Fox News’ “straight news” anchors, not as one of its political commentators. He told viewers that Fox News will “definitely be covering” the lawsuit and said “the big headline in all of this is the lawsuit from the state of New York that Letitia James just announced.” “Let’s move on,” he said, ending the segment. In total, Fox News showed about 40 seconds of the press conference, while the other major cable news networks — CNN and MSNBC — covered 35 minutes of the press conference and continued coverage of the lawsuit after it ended. Despite Ms. Faulkner’s claim that the press conference was “inside baseball” information — implying that it was more detailed and technical than the average Fox News viewer should know — the network has covered much more specialized content in past. The network gave significant airtime to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2021, which included intricate details of the president’s son’s work in Ukraine. According to a Media Matters analysis, it spent three times more airtime on this story than it did on the coronavirus pandemic. Fox News also covered district-focused parent groups protesting “critical race theory” in elementary schools and — though only contained on Fox News Nation’s online streaming platform — aired Tucker Carlson’s testicle tanning documentary “End of Men”. As for the lawsuit, Ms. James said her office had sent a criminal referral to federal prosecutors in Manhattan and the IRS regarding the Trump family’s alleged crimes. The civil suit seeks at least $250 million in damages and to bar Trump and his grown children — minus Tiffany Trump — from serving as officers of a company in New York, as well as to permanently bar the companies named in the action from operating in the state . Ms. James said the Trumps “repeatedly and persistently manipulated the value of the assets to induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms” than they would have otherwise been offered. He claimed they did it to “pay lower taxes” and satisfy loan covenants.
