​‘Fan fiction’: Conservative journalists slam Fox News and right-wing media for promoting Trump’s bogus voter fraud claims​

Right-wing media outlets have marginalized conservatives who are critical of President Donald Trump, often pretending that Never Trump journalists like CNN's S.E. Cupp and Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis don't exist. And when Cupp and Lewis appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, December 13, they slammed the right-wing outlets that are giving their audiences "fan fiction" and promoting Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

Cupp told "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter, "Fox News and OAN and Newsmax are not telling their viewers what they need to hear. They're telling them what they want to hear. That's fan fiction."

News outlets, according to Cupp, have a responsibility to "tell facts as they exist, even if they are not what your viewers want to hear."

Cupp and Lewis make it abundantly clear that they consider Joe Biden president-elect and believe that Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud are nonsense. But Lewis lamented that millions of Trump voters who consume right-wing media honestly buy into Trump's claims and don't realize that they're consuming disinformation.

Lewis told Stelter, "These conservatives really do believe the election was stolen. It's an alternate reality…. You can't get past that belief, and it's sincere."

The Daily Beast columnist also voiced some criticisms of the mainstream media, saying, "I've long been a critic of liberal media bias. I think it exists." But Lewis told Stelter that in the past, conservatives and liberals — for all their disagreements — "had a shared set of facts. They don't anymore."

Lewis slammed Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, who recently interviewed Trump, for not pushing back against the president's voter fraud claims.

"This is a con from Donald Trump and Fox News, and OAN and Newsmax," Lewis told Stelter. "They know it's a con."