Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio.
At the end of the second hour, Carmichael weighed in on the Trump-Axios interview where Jonathan Swan intentionally misled the President stating that mail-in voting applications are sent out like absentee ballots. He added that this was a concerted effort by Google and the mainstream media to deceive voters.
Leahy: Michael Patrick Leahy and Crom Carmichael in the studio. Crom, I really do think that our listeners would love to hear what we talk about during the breaks because we point out these interesting things. You were talking about the president’s interview.
Carmichael: Yes. With Axios. So during the break, I googled “Axios Trump interview” and all of the results I got for that, every one of the results was negative. It was CNN. It was Axios. It was Deadline News. Washington Post. Read some of the headlines.
Leahy: If you go Axios Trump interview. CNN. Analysis: One Big Reason it Was so Enraging to Watch Trump’s Interview With Axios. Washington Post. Axios’s Jonathan Swan is The Latest Interviewer to Leave Trump Grasping on TV. The Guardian. The Dying: It is What it Is. Key Takeaways From Trump’s Interview. That must have been a terrible interview, Crom.
Carmichael: Now if go and google “Axios Trump interview” FOX News, then you get the story of how Jonathan Swan apologized to Trump after the interview for making a mistake during the interview. For Jonathan Swan. And it was probably the biggest single issue of the interview and Jonathan Swan got it wrong.
Leahy: Totally got it wrong.
Carmichael: So everybody in the news that Jonathan Swan had gotten it wrong and apologized. But Google, unless you ask for Fox News’s analysis you won’t get the fact that Jonathan Swan apologized.
Leahy: And let me read that. This is the Fox News story. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan apologizes for the mail-in voting claim made during Trump interview. And here’s the lede.
“Axios reporter Jonathan Swan made an apology on Tuesday regarding a claim he made during a pre-taped interview.
A pre-taped interview with President Trump which aired Monday night. Swan’s interview generated many headlines from his thoughts on the late congressman John Lewis to his defense of the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. One of the fury exchanges during the sit down was mail-in voting. Something that the President has been outspokenly opposed in recent weeks. ‘They are going to send tens of millions of ballots in to California all over the place. Who is going to get them?'”
Leahy: “They send applications, not ballots,” Swan replied.
Carmichael: That’s what Swan said and that’s wrong. Swan was wrong.
Leahy: Well not only was he wrong Crom, how could a reporter interviewing the president not know that when they send out mail-in ballots in California vote by mail. He knew that Crom.
Carmichael: I’m saying yes.
Leahy: He’s not that stupid.
Carmichael: No.
Leahy: He intentionally misled the president.
Carmichael: He didn’t intentionally mislead him. He intentionally stated a falsehood to the president.
Leahy: Intentionally. That is it.
Carmichael: That’s what he did. And then the media, this reminds me, Michael, of the election in 2000. I can’t say I’ll never forget it because I don’t know if I’ll be Joe Biden at some point. But in 2000 you may recall that at seven o’clock eastern time the polls in Florida closed at seven o’clock.
At seven o’clock eastern time every major network called Florida for Gore. Every single one. They said the polls are closed in Florida. Shocking news Gore has won. Shocking news Gore has won. And they said that for an entire hour.
And then after it was now seven o’clock central time and the polls had finally closed in the Panhandle then they go, oh, we made a mistake. The Panhandle was still open. We apologize. And then we are now putting it back in the toss-up column. It turned out that their statement that the polls had closed greatly depressed the vote in the Panhandle because people in the Panhandle that heard the news that the polls had closed didn’t go vote in the last hour.
And so the number of people who normally vote in the Panhandle was down by about 60,000 votes across the whole Panhandle in the central time zone. And every one of the networks said we just didn’t know that the Panhandle was in central time zone. Now can you believe that? I can’t.
I can’t because first of all CNN is headquartered in Atlanta. Atlanta knows when the central time zone starts. And they let their reporters go for an entire hour. And even the ABC and NBC affiliates in Pensacola and Panama City had apparently sent messages into headquarters saying no no no our polls are still open and they were ignored.
So what you have here, this has been going on for well more than 20 years where the media is just literally in cahoots to the point where dishonesty is not. And it’s truly Machiavellian. Truly Machiavellian. What you have here, this debate if you send out an application for a mail-in ballot there is some legitimacy to that because somebody has to sign for it. Now if you just do it indiscriminately you are still going to have voter fraud. What Trump is saying is that in California they didn’t just mail out applications, they just mailed out the ballots.
Leahy: And Jonathan Swan knew that.
Carmichael: And Jonathan Swan knew that. Jonathan Swan said no that’s not what they do they send out applications. And he was lying. No, he was lying.
Leahy: This was all as set up. And they’re all in on it Crom. The Google guys knew this.
Carmichael: That’s exactly right. By the way, a lie is a statement that is intended to deceive. Not something that is simply wrong. If you say something that you think is correct and it turned out to be incorrect, that is called a mistake. This was not a mistake. Because this interview as it points out was pre-recorded so they could have fixed it.
Leahy: They could have fixed it and they chose not too.
Carmichael: They chose not too.
Leahy: Because they wanted it to play out like this and they knew how Google would report on it.
Carmichael: So here’s more evidence.
Leahy: Google is basically trying to swing 10-15 percent of the vote.
Carmichael: So is Facebook. All of them are trying to do it and we’ll see if the American people will buy it. I have more confidence in the American people that they can see through it.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Donald Trump-Axios Interview” by HBO.
