As he’s been known to do from time-to-time, Fox News Channel (FNC) anchor Shepard Smith flashed his liberal tilt on Wednesday afternoon in reading a simple news brief about the Supreme Court putting a stay on North Carolina’s voter I.D. law by lamenting that, in his book, such laws are intended to discourage minorities from voting.
The 33-second news brief started off fairly innocent with Smith explaining that “we’ve just gotten an AP news alert out of the State of North Carolina” before reading the headline from the Associated Press.
It was following this that the journalists who complained about Syrian refugee critics, legitimate questions from colleagues about Baltimore riots, and former Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal for saying “All Lives Matter” showed his disdain for a simple means to preserve the electoral process that’s already under attack from hackers:
North Carolina put in one of those you have to show an I.D. rules which, so often in Republican states, are designed to keep some minorities from being able to vote and they’ve tried to reach the number of voting days. The U.S. Court says that will not happen. Those rules will not go into effect in North Carolina this cycle.
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Longtime NewsBusters readers would recall how such asinine assertions about voter I.D. laws drove former managing editor and current Washington Times writer Ken Shepherd up a wall (see here, here, and here) as MSNBC pundits and writers bloviated about it being a coordinated “voter suppression” campaign against particularly African-Americans despite the lengths some states would go for forms of acceptable identification and allowing provisional balloting in the interim.
My colleague Kyle Drennen showcased an excellent debunking of this behavior from MSNBC’s Tamron Hall back on August 22 as election attorney Mark Braden called out her citations of the Brennen Center brushing off voter fraud as coming from “an advocacy group” pushing “the notion that vote fraud doesn't exist, is, of course, lunacy.”
The relevant portion of the transcript from FNC’s Shepard Smith Reporting on August 31 can be found below.
FNC’s Shepard Smith Reporting
August 31, 2016
3:41 p.m. Eastern
SHEPARD SMITH: And we’ve just gotten an AP news alert out of the state of North Carolina. Raleigh, North Carolina, Associated Press and I quote, “the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to restore North Carolina's GOP-backed voter I.D. and its reduction in early-voting days.” North Carolina put in one of those you have to show an I.D. rules which, so often in Republican states, are designed to keep some minorities from being able to vote and they’ve tried to reach the number of voting days. The U.S. Court says that will not happen. Those rules will not go into effect in North Carolina this cycle.
