brain room fox research

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merri ok

when disbanded? why? by? doh az call biden 2020

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mma 3 24

Fox News wants its viewers to think that one of yesterday’s witnesses at the House GOP’s impeachment hearing is untrustworthy.

But the network isn’t concerned about the one who testified from federal prison after a fraud conviction, or the one who admits to having a grievance with Hunter Biden.

No, the guy Fox wants viewers to disbelieve is the witness who told the committee that he played a key role in concocting the anti-Biden Ukrainian disinformation campaign that played out on Fox’s airwaves.

Fox has long known Lev Parnas lacked credibility, thanks to research by its own staff. But now it’s finally useful to the network’s narratives to say so.

Back in 2019, Parnas was part of a Rudy Giuliani-driven campaign to smear Joe Biden and his son Hunter as corrupt because of actions and positions the senior Biden took regarding Ukraine when he was vice president. Giuliani worked with a motley crew of Fox News staples such as conservative writer John Solomon and Republican attorneys Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing to launder Russian-linked disinformation into the right-wing media ecosystem. The goal was to lay the groundwork for attacking then-President Donald Trump’s most likely opponent in the 2020 presidential election.

Parnas, along with fellow Soviet-born con man Igor Fruman, worked closely with Giuliani to feed him an endless supply of lies about Joe Biden and his supposed corruption. This effort ultimately got Trump impeached for attempting to blackmail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden, but it’s nonetheless most familiar now for serving as the incredibly shaky foundation of the right’s current efforts to impeach Biden.

Media Matters extensively documented the key role Fox News played in laundering this smear campaign into the media.

Giuliani’s strategy hinged on the network’s active participation. Working with con men like Parnas and other Trump cronies, he pursued an “investigation” into Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son. He provided his “report” to allies in Congress to exploit while also feeding the story to conservative columnist John Solomon, who at the time worked at The Hill and dutifully reported out Giuliani’s claims in dozens of columns. During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity alone, with host Sean Hannity weaving Solomon’s reporting into his ever-evolving conspiracy theories that “deep state” elements were out to get Trump.

Despite what played on the network’s airwaves, behind the scenes Fox News' researchers warned that Parnas and his allies’ information was not reliable. As The Daily Beast reported, “Fox News’ own research team has warned colleagues not to trust some of the network’s top commentators’ claims about Ukraine.”

According to The Daily Beast, the 162-page brief compiled by researchers for what was then known as Fox’s Brain Room “openly” questioned “Fox News contributor John Solomon’s credibility, accusing him of playing an ‘indispensable role’ in a Ukrainian ‘disinformation campaign.’”

The document also specifically called into question Parnas’ credibility, noting: “Reading the timeline in its entirety—not a small task—makes clear the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in spreading disinformation.”

Indeed, when Parnas was arrested for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, he was at the airport, preparing to leave the country in order to facilitate an interview with disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for none other than Sean Hannity.

Shortly after his arrest, Parnas flipped, and he has since repeatedly sought to expose the misinformation campaign he facilitated and the key players behind it. During Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, Parnasprovided evidence about the pressure Trump allies were placing on Ukrainian officials to provide information about Biden.

With Parnas’ change in position, Fox suddenly became much more publicly skeptical of the claims he was making. And yesterday, when he testified in the latest of the House Republicans’ doomed efforts to invent a reason to impeach Joe Biden, he specifically called out Fox’s tendency to run with the dubious, unverifiable claims he had given to John Solomon:

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): At what point did the campaign to dig up dirt on Biden become a campaign to spread disinformation and lies about Biden?

LEV PARNAS: At some point when we hit a few brick walls, all of a sudden, then I saw the shift between the BLT group, which included John Solomon, the media personality, and Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers, to start trying to push narratives that were — we had no, they were not validated. We had no way to validate them. Basically, a letter would come over from somebody in Ukraine, I'd hand it over to John Solomon. Next thing you knew he was on Fox TV two hours later with Sean Hannity.

Predictably, Fox has sought to discredit Parnas’ testimony by attacking his credibility.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade complained that Parnas “went to jail for lying and is talking about Ukraine” (Parnas was convicted of wire fraud and campaign finance violations, not anything related to his work with Giuliani) and said his testimony was nothing but a “head fake” on the part of the Democrats who invited him to testify.

So-called “straight news” anchor John Roberts said of Parnas: “The credibility of a witness clearly depends on which side of the political aisle you sit, because the Democrats were happy to have Lev Parnas testify there in person. He’s been in jail for wire fraud, among other things, but Jason Galanis, who’s currently in jail, oh, he had no credibility. So, I mean, pick and choose your villains here, right?”

It's convenient how Fox suddenly develops journalistic standards when the claims Parnas is making no longer fit the network’s anti-Biden narratives.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/foxdominion-lawsuit/what-brain-room-center-latest-revelations-dominions-lawsuit-against-fox-news

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/blockbuster-report-fox-executives-and-top-anchor-bret-baier-tried-subvert-decision-desk

matt g

Top Fox News executives interfered with the election projections of the network’s vaunted “decision desk” due to blowback from then-President Donald Trump, according to a new book. The reports — and the actions Fox took with regard to its decision desk following the 2020 election — demolish the network’s argument that its “news side” is a credible journalistic operation walled off from the “opinion side’s” Republican Party propaganda machine.

InThe Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report that while Fox’s decision desk had been comfortable with its election night call that Joe Biden had won Arizona, “Fox executives were freaking out” that week as the network came “under tremendous pressure from Trump and his allies.” Fox’s call made it more difficult for Trump to subvert the election after declaring victory on election night, and he responded by successfully encouraging Fox viewers to switch to its competitors.

Jay Wallace, Fox’s president and executive editor, took a direct action overriding the decision desk in hopes of avoiding further criticism from Trump supporters on the Friday after election day, according to Baker and Glasser.

Wallace “overruled the Decision Desk team including Bill Sammon,Arnon Miskin, and Chris Stirewalt, refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden even after other networks did, a level of interference that had been unheard of in past elections,” they write. “The reason had little to do with Nevada. Because of the Arizona projection, calling Nevada would give Biden enough electoral votes for victory. Wallace did not want Fox to be the first to call the election and declare Biden president-elect.”

Wallace’s act followed two other proposals from senior Fox employees to interfere with the decision desk for Trump’s benefit, according to the book.

First, “at 8:30 the morning after the election, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive officer, even suggested that Fox should not call any more states until they were officially certified,” they reported. As Baker and Glasser noted, “official state certifications typically took days or even weeks and no network had ever waited until then before telling their viewers who had won.”

“A couple other top executives backed up Scott,” while Sammon, the Washington managing editor who directed the decision desk, advised against the move, according to the book. (That Sammon, who slanted Fox’s reporting to the right and bragged about falsely portraying Barack Obama as a socialist during the 2008 election,was the voice of reason here shows how far the network had gone.)

But two days later, they report that Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier sent Wallace an email arguing that Fox should reverse its Arizona call and instead project that Trump had won the state — even though he trailed at the time by more than 10,000 votes.

“The Trump campaign was really pissed,” he wrote in an email to Jay Wallace, the president and executive editor at Fox. “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air.” He accused the Decision Desk of “holding on for pride” and added: “It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it—even if it gives us major egg [on our faces]—and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.

Fox executives sell ads by touting the purported firewall between the network’s right-wing “opinion side” and its respectable “news side.” But here we have the network’s top “news side” anchor imploring the head of “news side” programming to make the “news side” decision desk fraudulently award a state to Trump because his campaign was demanding it. That says more about Fox’s role as GOP propaganda than any “opinion side” monologue. (In a statement, Baier denied writing that the Trump campaign “was really pissed,” claiming that the quote was “from an external email that I referenced,” but complained only of the “context” of the remainder of the quotes.)

Wallace didn’t follow through on Baier’s proposal, but according to Baker and Glasser he blocked the decision desk’s Nevada call the following day.The day after that, Fox saw the writing on the wall and followed CNN, ABC, CBS, and The Associated Press in declaring that Biden had won the election.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The network’s brass subsequently established an incentive structure that would dissuade similar “news side” threats to Fox’s bottom line.

Baker and Glasser report that Sammon and Stirewalt were then “summarily fired,” with the announcement delayed until January and described as a “retirement” and part of a “restructuring,” respectively.

Over the months that followed, “opinion side” hosts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters, who had both questioned the network’s Arizona call, were given their own weeknight shows. They each took over time slots that had previously been occupied by “news side” programs. Other prominent election deniers were also promoted and given increased prominence at the network.

Everyone who works at Fox now knows that if they help Republicans try to steal an election, they’ll be richly rewarded. If they try to interfere with that effort by accurately stating that the Democrats won, the network’s top executives may overrule them and they will find themselves looking for a new job.

Fox’s decision desk is now just another piece of the right’s election subversion machine— one its executives can deploy at will — and its projections should be treated as such. Any future Fox election calls that diverge from other networks to the benefit of the GOP should be treated with extreme skepticism.

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an 8 22

On Election Night 2020, Fox News seriously scooped the competition when its decision desk, under Chris Stirewalt, called Arizona for Democratic now-President Joe Biden — a bombshell that confirmed how much of a swing state Arizona, once a deep red hotbed of Barry Goldwater/John McCain conservatism, has evolved into. And other media outlets subsequently confirmed Fox News’ reporting.

Fox News’ decision desk was ahead of other major media outlets when it came to Arizona and the 2020 presidential election results, and Political Editor Stirewalt was the person who, more than anyone, Fox News had to thank.But instead of giving Stirewalt a promotion, they fired him.

Former President Donald Trump and many other MAGA Republicans angrily railed against Fox News for calling Arizona for Biden, claiming that Arizona was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud — a false claim that has been debunked time and time again. And Fox competitor Newsmax TV promoted itself as the cable news channel that was more pro-Trump and more right-wing than Fox News and Fox Business.

Stirewalt candidly addresses his termination in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” which has an August 23 release date on Amazon. And according to a book excerpt discussed by journalists Blake Hounshell and Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times on August 19 and by Tom Porter in Business Insider on August 22, Stirewalt is vehemently critical of Fox News for promoting nonsense conspiracy theories in the weeks following the 2020 election.

Hounshell and Peters report, “After a decade at Fox News, Chris Stirewalt was suddenly shown the door in January 2021, becoming a casualty of restructuring — or, at least, that was how Fox described his and other layoffs that swept out longtime journalists who were part of the network’s news division. Stirewalt, who was part of the team at Fox News that projects election results and whotestified before the House January 6 committee this summer, suspects there was a bigger reason behind his firing, which he explains in his new book, ‘Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back.’”

Fox News has denied that Stirewalt was fired for offending Trump and his supporters; they have characterized the termination as simply a matter of corporate restructuring. But Stirewalt has his doubts.

Porter reports, “A network representative told Insider, in January 2021, that Stirewalt had parted company with them as part of a restructuring process. In his memoir, said the Times, Stirewalt alleged the network is playing a key role in the radicalization of the U.S. right, accusing it of spreading ‘black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.’ In the book, he says that during Trump's term in office, the network fed viewers what they wanted to hear, provoking the firestorm of criticism he encountered from Republicans after the Arizona call.”

In an excerpt from “Broken News,” Stirewalt accuses his former employer of telling far-right viewers what they want to hear — regardless of whether or not it is factual.

Fox News’ former political editor writes, "Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”

In recent years, opinion host Tucker Carlson has had some of the highest ratings at Fox News — even higher than long-time Fox host Sean Hannity.

Stirewalt, in “Broken News,” writes, “Carlson is rich and famous. Yet he regularly rails about the 'big, legacy media outlets.' Guests denounce the 'corporate media' on his show, and Fox's CEO calls Carlson 'brave' for discussing controversial topics. Yet somehow, nobody even giggles. It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”

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an 7 22

although Fox News is facing a major defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for promoting the false and totally debunked claim that Dominion’s equipment was used to help steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, some members of Fox News’ hard news division did some accurate reporting on Election Night. Fox News’ decision desk, in fact, accurately called Arizona for now-President Joe Biden on Election Night 2020, and according to former White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner’s new book, “Breaking History: A White House Memoir,” Rupert Murdoch had no doubt that Biden was the legitimate winner in Arizona.

After Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Murdoch, according to the book, told Kushner, “The numbers are ironclad. It’s not even close.” Subsequent vote recounts in Arizona demonstrated that Murdoch, in that case, was absolutely right: Biden, not Trump, was the clear winner in Arizona....

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https://www.salon.com/2020/10/19/fox-news-rejected-hunter-biden-expos-new-york-post-writer-refused-to-put-his-name-on-it-reports/

oct 20?

when former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani approached Fox News with the trove of emails he alleged had been retrieved from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the network declined to run the story over concerns about its credibility, according to a new report.

Sources told Mediaite that "the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden's alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network's news division to pass."

Giuliani previously told The New York Times that he had chosen to place the material with The New York Post because "either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."

The Post, a sister company of Fox News, published the unverified emails in a Wednesday exposé, which drew widespread blowback for its dubious sourcing. The Times earlier reported that most of The Post article had been written by a staff reporter who refused to allow the tabloid to attach his name to the byline over doubts about the article's credibility.

The alleged emails informing the article were obtained in a circuitous route by two Trump allies: Giuliani and former White House strategist Steve Bannon,** who currently faces wire fraud and money laundering charges in a federal court. The pair gave the outlet a copy of what they claimed was content copied from a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, the youngest son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which they said had been obtained from a computer repairman who wished to remain anonymous.

The repairman told a group of reporters last week that a man named Hunter Biden had dropped the laptop off at his store, but medical issues with his vision prevented him from making an identification.

A number of Post staffers questioned the vetting process for the article and expressed concerns about the sources and the timing as the election nears, The Times reported. Upon publication, other journalists pointed out major errors and holes in article, and the FBI has since opened an investigation into the story as part of a possible Russian disinformation operation, according to multiple reports.

The Times also reported that one of the article's two bylined authors had first learned that her name was on the report after publication; the other writer never previously had a byline at the paper. Both writers formerly worked at Fox News.

The Trump-friendly cable network's so-called "Brain Room" had previously warned hosts about Giuliani's reputation for "amplifying disinformation,"according to The Daily Beast.

One day after The Post published its story, The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials had repeatedly warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was a target of Russian intelligence, and information he passed along might be tainted by his interactions with pro-Putin officials in Ukraine.

....

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wapo

http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=91a4cb4122de0af505cbbe73314de12ff4a01553c54fdcfce3c50363f29e427e43db487e53f170404e838b0408cc8f35c70243c7a77a7ddd

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/07/its-own-document-fox-news-rips-fox-news-host-sean-hannity/

ref $

no lnx

Opinions

In its own document, Fox News rips Fox News host Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity on the set of his show on Aug. 7, 2019. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Erik Wemple

Media critic

Feb. 7, 2020 at 12:06 p.m. PST

Each night, Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity engage in some shallow blather during the “handoff” between their ratings-killing programs. In Thursday night’s version, Hannity told Carlson, “You know the deep-state story is even getting bigger. There’s a whole new one developing. I’ll tell you about it privately.”

Cute, Hannity....

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinions

In its own document, Fox News rips Fox News host Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity on the set of his show on Aug. 7, 2019. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Erik Wemple

Media critic

February 7, 2020 at 3:06 PM EST

Cute, Hannity.

Just what could this “new” deep-state story be? A clue emerged from a strange sequence of events on Twitter. Marcus DiPaola, who formerly worked at Fox News, posted some tweets about his experience with the network, as well as the front page of an interesting internal document:

Here's the front page of the internal Fox News Trump-Ukraine timeline. I'll start tweeting some of the highlights shortly. pic.twitter.com/HWGX5sZUh8

— Marcus J. DiPaola (@marcusdipaola) February 6, 2020

That’s the title page of a dossier from the so-called Brain Room of Fox News, a long-standing research hive at the network. The full Ukrainian report, obtained by the Erik Wemple Blog, is a document of great candor and thoroughness, 162 pages of events and statements and indictments and hearings that detail every last wrinkle in the Trump-Ukraine story. Its timeline starts in February 2014 — when former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv for Russia — and concludes in December 2019 — when Trump declared that his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, would write up a report about the findings of his Ukrainian investigation. “I hear he has found plenty,” said the president.

The Brain Room report bears the name of Bryan Murphy, a senior political affairs specialist at Fox News. It also bears this withering assessment of John Solomon, former opinion contributor for the Hill who is responsible for setting in motion faulty story lines regarding Ukraine: “John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign.” Another part of the document provides this assessment of Solomon: “Focus on stories from disinformation campaign, non-disclosure of conflicts, use of unreliable sources, publishing false and misleading stories, misrepresentation of sources, and opaque coordination with involved parties.”

That says it all. Even as it levels that critique, the Brain Room document discloses that Solomon is a “Fox News contributor.” Indeed, though Solomon appeared as a guest frequently on “Hannity” throughout the Ukraine story, he left the Hill in fall 2019 and was hired as a contributor at Fox News in October.

Not only does the research paper pummel Solomon, it cites a statistic that Solomon, over six months in 2019, “published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine." Where did that statistic come from?

Media Matters for America! Yes, Media Matters for America, the organization essentially built to take down Fox News. Media Matters for America, the organization routinely slammed on Fox News’s air. Media Matters for America, the organization that essentially forced Glenn Beck from Fox News.

It’s a stunning juxtaposition — one that speaks to the integrity of the Brain Room report. Other faces of the Ukraine issue that surface in the report include Giuliani, the ringleader of Trump’s effort to secure an announcement by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of an investigation into the Bidens, who is described as having: “High susceptibility to disinformation” from key Ukrainian actors, according to the document. Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, a Trump-supporting husband-and-wife legal team, receive this evaluation: “Non-disclosure of financial motives and representation of [Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro] Firtash while spreading false and misleading stories.”

Note: Giuliani, diGenova and Toensing appeared on “Hannity” with regularity to take the president’s side on Ukraine. All that explains, perhaps, why Hannity is making noises about a “new” deep state.

Though Fox News isn’t exactly forthcoming about its internal operations, the Brain Room isn’t a state secret. Occasionally network hosts will reference its work, as did Jesse Watters last fall, when he saw a Washington Post headline that he didn’t believe was real: “When I saw the headline afterwards, I forwarded it to our Brain Room because I thought it was an Onion” story, said Watters. There’s a great reverence among employees for the work of the room, as reflected in this comment from former host Kimberly Guilfoyle in June 2017: “Here are some doughnut facts from our Brain Room, so [they] must be true.”

A 2011 story in Rolling Stone quoted a network insider as alleging that the Brain Room was where "the evil resides.” And a former network executive told Gabriel Sherman — for his biography of late Fox News chief Roger Ailes — that the room had a “Nixonian” air. That said, Sherman wrote that the “mystique” of the Brain Room faded over time as staffers realized that it was a professional operation designed to fact-check the news. It’s the Brain Room, for example, that feeds all those contextual facts that viewers see on their screens during congressional hearings and other political events.

There’s no absence of context in the Brain Room’s Ukraine magnum opus. It has everything, including key revelations and charges against Hannity. Here’s the timeline’s entry for March 26, 2019:

:{:{}:

Melinda Haring, the editor of the UkraineAlert blog at the Atlantic Council and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, writes in the Washington Post:“The mechanics of the information operation that Poroshenko’s minions pulled off are obvious. Lutsenko used Solomon to get to Hannity to get to Trump, whose Twitter feed set thousands chattering about nonexistent collusion… If a bunch of obscure foreigners few Americans have ever heard of can play Trump so easily, and so obviously, what’s to stop others from doing the same?”

:{:{}:

(387) David Holmes, Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, later said, “The barrage of allegations directed at Ambassador Yovanovitch, a career ambassador, is unlike any anything I have seen in my professional career.” (388)

Here’s another, absolutely devastating entry:

:{:{}:

September 26, 2019: John Solomon, Toensing, and diGenova all appear on Hannity again to discuss Shokin’s affidavit, filed at the request of Firtash’s attorneys. At no time during the program does Hannity, Toensing, and diGenova mention who requested the statement nor do they discuss that they are Firtash’s attorneys. Solomon also doesn’t mention that he shares attorneys with Firtash. diGenova says “we’ve known from the very beginning that Mr. Shokin was not a corrupt prosecutor.” (856) Later that night, President Trump tweets a clip of diGenova from Hannity. (857)

More: In an entry for Oct. 9, 2019, the Brain Room document notes that Andriy Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, had made a specific allegation regarding corruption by former vice president Joe Biden. The Kyiv Post, notes the Brain Room report, called the charge “dubious.” “Hours later, Giuliani appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News and parroted Derkach’s claim. (897).”

In an entry that footnotes reporting from the Erik Wemple Blog, the document even tosses shade on how Hannity introduces Solomon on his program:

May 14, 2018: The Hill’s editor-in-chief sent out a memo to staff stating that “effective immediately” John Solomon would no longer publish stories under the banner of news but instead would be an “opinion contributor.” (218) Solomon said that the choice to have his writing classified as opinion was his. During his TV appearances, Hannity has often continued to announce Solomon as an “investigative reporter” at The Hill.

What we have here is a journalistic blowout. It is a trouncing of Hannity and his treasured contributor, Solomon — written not by some mainstream media outlet or Media Matters for America, but by Fox News itself. Turns out the network is keeping its best reporting to itself.

In a statement to the Erik Wemple Blog, Mitchell Kweit, senior vice president of the Brain Room, said: “The research division of FOX News produces a briefing book for all major stories, which serves as a standing collection of extensive data on major topics for internal use by all those in editorial functions. The Ukraine briefing book is nothing more than a comprehensive chronological account of what every person involved in the Ukraine controversy was doing at any identifiable point in time, including tracking media appearances of major players who appeared on FOX News and in many other outlets. The 200 page document has thousands of data points and the vast majority have no relation to FOX News – instead it’s now being taken out of context and politicized to damage the network.”

In an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, DiPaola commended Fox News for the separation between opinion shows and the so-called straight-news side, where he worked as a freelancer for a few months. “It did feel a lot like church and state,” he says. “They separate news from opinion pretty well.” As for the Brain Room timeline, DiPaola says, “I mean, it’s a Brain Room product, it’s meant to be unbiased. It’s evidence that Fox News Channel isn’t all bad. It’s evidence that there are honorable people working at Fox News all day.”

And it’s evidence that those honorable people understand the threat “Hannity” poses to any news organization.