Did Fox News Just Let the Cat Out of the Bag?

As if that first segment wasn't bad enough, the one that followed featured Fox News Live host Arthel Neville interviewing—attacking—former college swimmer and current Outkick contributor Riley Gaines. 

Gaines was on to talk about the WNBA—Angel Reese getting slapped with a flagrant foul after trying to take Caitlin Clark's head off during a WNBA game and Clark being left off the U.S. Olympic roster. Gaines pointed out that the WNBA has a history of controversial players, including Brittney Griner, who spent ten months in Russian custody after officials caught her with hash oil, which is illegal in Russia, in her luggage. 

"Given what happened overseas, given that she was put in jail, mean, the controversy is certainly there, whether we want it there or not," Gaines said. 

"Not her fault and wrongly accused!" Neville interrupted. "Let's be fair, Riley. I like you a lot, too."

"That's not right," Neville continued, not allowing Gaines to respond. "She was wrongly accused, and that is not fair to bring that up, so we're going to delete that; let's you and I continue."

Note that Gaines didn't even claim Griner was guilty, only that she is controversial. 

Nevertheless, it's patently false for Neville to say that Griner was wrongly accused. 

While the U.S. State Department did declare that Griner was "wrongly detained," it did not say that she was falsely accused or not guilty. She admitted her guilt in court, and no one, to my knowledge, has suggested that she did not have vape cartridges filled with hash oil in her luggage. 

The New York Times explains the State Department's "wrongfully detained" policy: 

Generally, an American who is held by a foreign government for the purposes of influencing U.S. policy or extracting political or economic concessions from Washington is considered “wrongfully detained.” In these cases, negotiations between the United States and the other government are key to securing the American’s freedom.

In Griner's case, the U.S. State Department claimed that her sentence was politically motivated— and no doubt it was because that's how Vladimir Putin rolls. Antony Blinken and co. never claimed that Griner was "wrongly accused" of drug smuggling. She was returned to the U.S. in December 2022 after being exchanged for Russia's "Merchant of Death."

     Related: Caitlin Clark Shamed for Being ‘White, Straight, and From Iowa’

At any rate, that discussion is not what alarmed me when I watched the interview. When Neville said, "we're going to delete that," was she being literal? Perhaps she was just trying to get past a discussion that upset her, but why use those specific words? And why is the video of the exchange nowhere to be found online except in a single tweet from someone who recorded the TV with his phone?

Arthel Neville is terrible, so biased. she wants to edit someone’s comments if she doesn’t agree with them. pic.twitter.com/YKdR8e7dbq

— Rugerman45 (@markrugerman45) June 16, 2024

The interview with gun-grabber Rep. Jack Auchincloss is easy enough to find on the Fox News site and on social media, but I was unable to find the interview with Gaines—an extremely popular conservative cultural commenter—anywhere. It's as if it's been memory-holed. Is that what Arthel meant when she said they'd "delete that"?

I try to avoid conspiracy theories, but now I'm wondering if Fox does this regularly. Do producers scrub comments the network doesn't like? Is that what Neville was talking about? What I do know is that Fox News has been altered, and it is not for the better. It's one thing for producers to edit out clips that were garbled or not essential to the story, but editing out comments that the host didn't like? 

PJ Media contacted Fox News for comment but has not received a response at publishing time. 

Update: After this piece was published, someone tracked down the video on Rumble: