Fox chyron calls Biden’s speech ‘dark, divisive’ before it even starts

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Fox host Tucker Carlson kicked off his Sept. 1, 2022, show with an on-screen banner proclaiming “Tucker unpacks Biden’s dark, divisive speech” — and the speech hadn’t even started airing.

The chyron ran at the top of Carlson’s show at 8 p.m. eastern on top of a live feed from Philadelphia showing the empty lectern, making it obvious President Joe Biden hadn’t even come on stage yet, much less started his speech.

However, this didn’t stop the right-wing channel from labeling the speech as “dark” and “divisive” before a single word had been uttered. ]

In some cases, the White House provides advance copies of prepared remarks to the media, though it’s not clear if that was the case. It’s also common for key points of the speech and general information such as the theme to leak out beforehand, but the actual script is always subject to change.

The theme of bashing Biden’s speech continued throughout the hour, with Carlson and guests attacking the speech without actually letting viewers hear it live.

Fox, like most networks, probably had multiple producers monitoring the speech live so it could respond in quasi-realtime to what was being said.

Fox also notably didn’t carry the speech live like all other major broadcast and cable news networks in the U.S. Instead, it allowed Carlson to rant about the speech for the entire hour, occasionally showing a muted, live feed.