HANNITY 2
SEE THREE
12/17 proxy for sleaze? age of trump.
see main for earlier
see BAD trinity1/20 he's 1st to jump shark, then others follow?
see BAK
hanty tag 1119
no merri
bak
contemplating tag 1019 bak
prolly neglected the routine bs
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{{
ggl 4 25 2016 election
Sean Hannity}:
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Sean_Hannity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Hannity)
Sean Patrick Hannity (born December 30, 1961) is an American conservative television presenter, broadcaster and writer. He hosts The Sean Hannity Show, ...
The Sean Hannity Show · Hannity & Colmes · Ainsley Earhardt · Alan Colmes
[### Sean Hannity: I'm not Donald Trump's foil
Politico
https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/04 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/sean-hannity-donald-trump-221923)
Apr 13, 2016 — Sean Hannity wants to make one thing clear: He's not propping up Donald Trump. The conservative media host shot down a recent ThinkProgress story.
[### Hannity apparently asked what to say on Election Day. ...
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2022/04/25](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/25/hannity-apparently-asked-what-say-election-day-then-he-said-it/)
Apr 25, 2022 — ... Fox News host Sean Hannity on the day of the 2020 election. ... Hannity had endorsed Trump before the 2016 election, an odd act for ...
[### Has Sean Hannity's Trump support crossed the line?
The Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com › USA › Politics › 2016](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/0921/Has-Sean-Hannity-s-Trump-support-crossed-the-line)
Sep 23, 2016 — Conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has been a vocal supporter of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, but critics, ...
[### Sean Hannity cites misleading Obama quote in coverage ...
PolitiFact
https://www.politifact.com › factchecks › jul › sean-han...](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jul/17/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-cites-misleading-obama-quote-coverage/)
Claim: "In 2016, when Hillary Clinton appeared to have a firm lead in the polls — oh, just before the election, it was President Obama who laughed off any notion...
Claimed by: Sean Hannity
Fact check by PolitiFact: Mostly False
[### Hannity: I'm voting for Trump
Politico
https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/06 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/sean-hannity-supports-trump-223763)
Jun 1, 2016 — Donald Trump on Tuesday sat down for an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, who made his support of Trump explicit.
[### US election 2016 daily briefing: Fox News stars in feud ...
BBC
https://www.bbc.com › election-us-2016-37570387](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37570387)
Oct 6, 2016 — Two of the conservative news channel's biggest stars have turned their sharp tongues on one another after Sean Hannity accused Megyn Kelly of being in league ...
Fox's fight night
Two of the conservative news channel's biggest stars have turned their sharp tongues on one another after Sean Hannity accused Megyn Kelly of being in league with Hillary Clinton.
The clash began when Kelly said on her Wednesday night programme that both Mrs Clinton and Donald Trump avoid tough media interviews. She said the Republican nominee "will go on Hannity and pretty much only Hannity".
Hannity - a vocal supporter of Trump - fired back on Twitter, writing: "u should be mad at @HillaryClinton Clearly you support her. And @realDonaldTrump did talk to u."
Another Twitter user chided Hannity, urging him to stand by his colleagues, but the host replied: "Sure. When they stand by me."
Ouch!
[### Trump and Sean Hannity Promote Ukraine-Clinton Theory
Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com › donald-trump-sean-hanni...](https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-sean-hannity-theory-ukraine-colluded-hillary-clinton-1376867)
Mar 27, 2019 — How Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Are Promoting Theory Ukraine Interfered in 2016 Election to Help Hillary Clinton. Published Mar 27, 2019 at ...
[### Sean Hannity campaigns on stage at Trump's Missouri rally ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2018/11/06 › media › trump-ral...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/media/trump-rally-missouri-hannity/index.html)
Nov 6, 2018 — Sean Hannity defied his own words on Monday, appearing on stage at President Donald Trump's final election rally after having said he ...
[### How Sean Hannity Became Influential In Conservative ...
Texas Public Radio | TPR
https://www.tpr.org › 2016-12-19 › how-sean-hannity-...](https://www.tpr.org/2016-12-19/how-sean-hannity-became-influential-in-conservative-media-and-politics)
Dec 19, 2016 — Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News show “Hannity” and a syndicated talk radio show, helped rally conservative support for Donald Trump.
How Sean Hannity Became Influential In Conservative Media And Politics
During the presidential campaign, Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News show “Hannity” and a syndicated talk radio show, helped rally conservative support for Donald Trump. That trend will most likely continue throughout the Trump presidency.
But how did Hannity become so influential in conservative media and Republican politics? Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Brian Rosenwald ( @brianros1), a media historian and fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who is writing a book about the rise of talk radio and its influence on public policy.
Interview Highlights
On Hannity’s talk radio background
“One thing that people sometimes forget in the political world is, TV might be sexier, but radio can often reach more listeners, and the audiences are intensely loyal. And Sean Hannity, his background is radio. Before he was doing TV, he was doing radio in Huntsville, Alabama, in Atlanta, Georgia, and a lot of these guys who do both will tell you they like radio more, they reach more people, they have more time, they like the medium better.
:{:{“He started out, he actually flopped on a college radio station in Santa Barbara, that was way to the left, where he went out there after he dropped out of college, and he admittedly says, ‘Look, I was terrible.’ And then he ended up starting his rise in Huntsville, Alabama, and he migrated to Atlanta, and he was doing morning drive on a talk station down there, and then he did some TV work, and Roger Ailes discovered him. And he comes to New York to do ‘Hannity & Colmes,’ and joins the powerhouse station on WABC.}:
And he’s there for a few years, and they decide in 2001… they’re looking for syndicated stars, especially conservative ones. ABC Radio decided to syndicate Hannity, and they have him set up to go in a bunch of major markets, and he has the, sort of, fortune to have his national debut be Sept. 10, 2001. And obviously the next day, sort of changes the face of the country, and the ratings for talk radio across the board skyrocket — people want to talk about it, they want to hear what other people are saying, it becomes kind of a virtual community, and people who had never heard Sean Hannity start to hear him, they like what they’re hearing, and he sort of goes from there to become the No. 2 guy in talk radio.”}:
Array
On Hannity’s relationship with his radio listeners
“I’ve heard callers say, ‘Thank God you’re out there Sean, we have a voice now.’ There are some people who spend more time with their favorite talk radio host than they do with their spouses. People who were driving a truck all day, or out on a tractor, or doing some other job where they can listen three hours a day, five days a week, 48, 50 weeks a year, to the same person, they feel like they get to know that person, and that person reflects their views. And then in a lot of cases, for conservatives, that person punches back at people who they feel like are maligning them and scorning them and mistreating them.”
On Hannity’s impact on the 2016 presidential election
“I think that, in the primary election, had people like Sean Hannity really been hardcore against Donald Trump, from day one — we’re going back to 2015 here — they might have been able to knock him off in the primary. In terms of a general election, people were bombarded on all sides with information, and usually, I don’t think talk radio has a huge influence in presidential general elections for that reason, but in this case, insomuch as the key to the election, or one of the keys, was getting conservatives who had misgivings about either Trump’s morals or his qualifications, or some of what he said, or some of the policies he supported, to go out and vote for him.
“I think talk radio’s kind of drumbeat of, ‘Hillary is worse,’ and attacking her and keeping her emails front and center from day one for a year and a half, that helped drive those conservatives with misgivings back onto the reservation, and this is what Hannity and other talk radio hosts do at election time, which is, they frame tings in such a way, and they keep their audience kind of understanding the stakes, and why Republicans — whatever misgivings you might have — Republicans are still the best way to go.”
2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.}endit :}:
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wiki 4 25
...According to The Washington Post, Hannity "repeatedly embraces storylines that prove to be inaccurate" and takes positions that change over time.[22] In the opinion of The New York Times, Hannity is "barreling headfirst into the murky territory between opinion and out-and-out conspiracy theorism".[21] Hannity often promotes conspiracy theories without explicitly endorsing them, unlike Alex Jones. The New York Times wrote that this "has the effect of nourishing the more wild-eyed beliefs of his fans while providing Hannity a degree of plausible deniability".[21] The New Yorker wrote in 2019 that Hannity had "[spewed] baseless conspiracy theories with impunity".[68]
During the Bush years, Hannity "loyally supported the president's policies".[22] During the Obama administration, Hannity "leaned more heavily on stories he believed were being given short shrift by the 'liberal media' – stories about where Obama was born, and who deserved blame for the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya".[22] In 2017, The Washington Post wrote that "what Hannity has stood for – at least for the past couple of years – is Trump."[22]
Donald Trump
Candidacy of Donald Trump
[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_%26_Sean_Hannity_%2816677778952%29.jpg)Hannity with Donald Trump in 2015.
:{:{Hannity is known for his pro-Trump coverage.[21][22][69] According to The Washington Post, "Hannity's comeback coincided with his early, eager embrace of his fellow New Yorker ... Trump attacked the Gold Star father, and Hannity stood by him. Trump went after a federal judge of Mexican descent, and Hannity backed him.}:
After the *Access Hollywood* tape emerged of Trump making lewd comments about inappropriate sexual behaviour towards women, Hannity continued to defend him: 'King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud.'"[22] After the inauguration, the first interview the new president gave to a cable news channel was conducted by Hannity.[22] Hannity additionally defended the Trump administration's false claim that Trump's inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.[22]}:
540cfc38-8821-11e7-961d-2f373b3977ee_story
:{:{Hannity has been criticized as being overly favorable to the candidacy of Trump and granting him more airtime than other presidential candidates during the 2016 primaries.[70] Hannity, for instance, let Trump promote the false claim that Rafael Cruz, father of Trump's rival presidential candidate Ted Cruz, was involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination.[22]}:
He admitted to favoring Republican candidates, though without indicating a preference for Donald Trump over Ted Cruz.[71] According to Dylan Byers of CNN, Hannity during interviews "frequently cites areas where he agrees with Trump, or where he thinks Trump was right about something, then asks him to expand on it", and "often ignores or defends Trump from criticism".[71]}:
Tensions between Cruz and Hannity appeared to reach a boiling point during a contentious April 2016 radio interview, during which Cruz implied Hannity was a "hardcore Donald Trump supporter" and Hannity responded by accusing Cruz of "throw[ing] this in my face" every time he asked a "legitimate question".[72] Jim Rutenberg commented in August 2016 that Hannity is "not only Mr. Trump's biggest media booster; he also veers into the role of adviser," citing sources who said Hannity spent months offering suggestions to Trump and his campaign on strategy and messaging.
:{:{Hannity responded to the report by saying, "I'm not hiding the fact that I want Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States. ... I never claimed to be a journalist."[73] (In an article published in December 2017, Hannity said "I'm a journalist. But I'm an advocacy journalist, or an opinion journalist.")[21] Hannity also appeared in a 2016 Trump campaign ad.[74]}:
Hannity has feuded with several conservatives who oppose Trump, including National Review's Jonah Goldberg,[75][76] Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens,[77] and National Review editor Rich Lowry.[78]}:
Relationships with Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and other officials
:{:{Hannity developed a close relationship with Trump during the election and became even closer during his presidency.[68] The two men spoke on the phone multiple times a week, discussing Hannity's weekday show, the special counsel investigation, even evaluating White House staff.}::{[68][13][79][80] Hannity shares, The Economist asserts, "Mr. Trump's love of conspiracy theories and hatred of snooty elites".[81] }:
They speak so often that one Trump adviser has said Hannity "basically has a desk in the place".[13] On the air, Hannity echoes Trump's attacks on the media and Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[82] Trump sometimes quotes Hannity to others or promotes the show to his Twitter followers.[14] Hannity has encouraged Trump to shut down the government to get funding for a border wall, as well as his declaration of a national emergency over the US–Mexico border.[14]}:
According to reports by the Los Angeles Times and New York magazine, Hannity frequently talks to Trump by telephone after Hannity's weekday broadcasts,[80][83][14] and Hannity is one of several dozen cleared callers whose calls to the White House public switchboard can be connected directly to the president.[83]
Hannity stirred controversy in April 2018 when it was revealed that he shared a lawyer, Michael Cohen, with Trump. In a breach of journalistic ethics, Hannity had failed to disclose that Cohen was his lawyer while at the same time taking to the Fox airwaves to defend Cohen and criticize those who investigated him.[84][85][86][87]
On April 9, 2018, federal agents from the U.S. Attorney's office served a search warrant on the office and residence of Michael Cohen, Trump's personal attorney.[88] On the air, Hannity defended Cohen and criticized the federal action, calling it "highly questionable" and "an unprecedented abuse of power".[89] On April 16, 2018, in a court hearing, Cohen's lawyers told the judge that Cohen had ten clients in 2017–2018 but did "traditional legal tasks" for only three: Trump, Elliott Broidy, and a "prominent person" who did not wish to be named for fear of being "embarrassed".[90][91][92] The federal judge ordered the revelation of the third client, whom Cohen's lawyers named as Hannity.[90] Although Hannity has covered Cohen on his show, he did not disclose that he had consulted with Cohen.[93]
Fox News released a statement on April 16, 2018, attributed to Hannity: "Michael Cohen has never represented me in any matter. I never retained him, received an invoice, or paid legal fees. I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective. I assumed those conversations were confidential, but to be absolutely clear they never involved any matter between me and a third party."[94] Also, NBC News quoted Hannity as saying: "We definitely had attorney–client privilege because I asked him for that,"[95] while Hannity said on his radio show that he "might have handed him ten bucks" for the attorney-client privilege.[94][90] Lastly, Hannity tweeted that his discussions with Cohen were "almost exclusively" about real estate.[96]
The following day, news reports revealed that Hannity had shared another lawyer with Trump, Jay Sekulow. Sekulow had written a cease-and-desist letter to KFAQ on Hannity's behalf in May 2017, and later represented Trump in connection with the Mueller investigation.[97][98]
In August 2018, Hannity allowed Sekulow and Rudy Giuliani, another personal lawyer for Trump, to host Hannity's radio show; the duo proceeded to defend Trump and promote arguments made by the Trump administration.[99]
In June 2019, Hannity expressed outrage at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's comment that she would like to see Trump "in prison". Hannity declared: "Based on no actual crimes, she wants a political opponent locked up in prison? That happens in banana republics – beyond despicable behavior." Aaron Rupar of Vox criticized Hannity for "obvious hypocrisy", noting that Hannity himself had said in January 2018 regarding Hillary Clinton: "I think Hillary should be in jail. Lock her up."[100] Aaron Blake of The Washington Post described Hannity's comment as "a pretty obvious bit of gaslighting", noting Hannity's loyalty to Trump, whose campaign rallies have featured chants of "Lock her up", and also Hannity's comments that Trump was free to investigate Clinton.[101]
Hannity played the most important role in persuading Trump to pardon the convicted murderer and war criminal Clint Lorance.[102]
After Trump lost the 2020 election, Hannity sent a number of text messages offering advice to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, including a message apparently suggesting a joint "NC Real estate" venture with him.[103][74]
In October 2023, a staffer on his show emailed Republican lawmakers asking why they weren't supporting Representative Jim Jordan, Donald Trump's choice for House Speaker to replace Representative Kevin McCarthy.[104][105]
Conspiracy theories
2016 election and Seth Rich...
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wapo ref above comeback 22
The making of Sean Hannity: How a Long Island kid learned to channel red-state rage
By Marc Fisher October 10
The president and his favorite prime-time pundit are both New Yorkers of significant means who talk like they grew up in the tough part of town. One drenches his well-done steaks in ketchup and the other favors Coors on ice. Both have long traveled by private jet, yet both feel somehow spurned by the elites.
Donald Trump and Sean Hannity champion the little guy, the forgotten men and women, the audience that has cheered Hannity on as he emerged in the past nine months as perhaps the most dependable pro-Trump voice in the mainstream media, as well as a friend and adviser to the president.
In the process, Fox News’s top-rated host has regained ratings supremacy, pushed back against an organized boycott of his advertisers and quieted rumors of his impending departure from the network.
Hannity, long a movement conservative, nonetheless embraced Trump, who is largely allergic to ideology. Like the president, who has been a Republican, a Democrat and an independent through the years, Hannity isn’t necessarily what he appears to be.
He denies being a journalist, but has said, “I think a lot of the reporting we do is better than the mainstream media.” He covets being in a position of authority, leading a movement, yet he repeatedly embraces storylines that prove to be inaccurate. He’s not a politician, but he takes positions, which have, as he puts it, a way of “evolving.” He was, for example, against amnesty for illegal immigrants, and then he was for creating “a pathway to citizenship,” and then he was against that idea.
What Hannity has stood for — at least for the past couple of years — is Trump. Rival TV host Joe Scarborough calls him Trump’s lap dog. Hannity, a still-rambunctious 55, insists he’s not; he’s pushed back against the president on tax reform and health care, for example.
But the president instinctively understands that his people are Hannity’s people and vice versa. At an August rally, when Trump bashed the media as “the source of division” in the nation, he made a single exception: “How good is Hannity?” he said to rising cheers. “How good is Hannity? And he’s a great guy and an honest guy.”
When the president was still opening casinos in Atlantic City, Hannity was systematically building a following, identifying the issues that could stir up listeners (homosexuality, he declared in his first radio gig, is “disgusting”) and portraying himself as a brash truth-teller whose plain talk was too blunt for the entrenched and the powerful.
Sean Hannity at UCSB KCSB radio station May of 1989. (Christopher Gardner)
April 1989: The voice on the answering machine at the Santa Barbara chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had a distinctive New York sound. The young man seeking help had just been thrown off his show on the radio station at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was being discriminated against because he’s a conservative, the voice said. Could the ACLU help Sean Hannity get his show back?
Stewart Holden, a local lawyer who volunteered for the ACLU, was intrigued. He asked his local board to take the case, even if Hannity’s show, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” had already achieved some notoriety. People had heard about the rookie host’s inflammatory style, how he railed against “liberal fascists” and hung up on callers he didn’t like.
Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., Hannity, then 27, spent an hour figuring out how to build an audience, how to connect with the bedrock conservative Americans he knew were out there, even in a solidly liberal college town like Santa Barbara.
“It’s my hope to make radio a career at some point,” Hannity wrote in his application for a no-pay position at KCSB in 1989. He wrote that he had “developed alot of dicipline and good-working habits.”
Hannity had come to Santa Barbara in part because his sister lived there. He supported himself as a house painter, wallpaper hanger and contractor, all the time listening to talk radio. He told people that he was “a serious intellectual” who was studying political science. In fact, Hannity attended three colleges — Adelphi, New York University and UC-Santa Barbara — but never graduated.
In his first months on the air, Hannity developed themes that would sustain him for decades — blasting the news media, lending credence to fringy theories, speaking up for the little guys who felt overrun by the elites. “America’s lost its virtue,” he said.
That April, Hannity shared his theories about AIDS, as a tape of the show reveals: “What is the coverup all about that the media is hiding from the general public? Contrary to what we hear in the general media, you can get AIDS from saliva, from tears. . . . They won’t let you say it’s a gay disease.”
More listeners called to complain about Hannity than about all of KCSB’s other shows combined, according to former managers. But the calls really spiked after Hannity’s show about AIDS. He said he wouldn’t want a gay teacher telling his child that homosexuality “is an alternative lifestyle.” He egged on a guest who claimed that AIDS was spreading among gay men because they consumed each other’s feces.
Jody May-Chang, who also had a show, “Gay and Lesbian Perspectives,” on KCSB, heard Hannity’s AIDS episode and felt compelled to call.
“I have a son, okay?” she said on the show. “I just gave birth to him about eight weeks ago and I certainly hope he doesn’t grow up to be like you.”
“Artificial insemination,” Hannity replied. “Aren’t you married to a woman, by the way?”
When May-Chang confirmed that she was, Hannity and his guest, Gene Antonio, an anti-gay activist, bantered about how her son came to be.
“Turkey baster babies,” Antonio said.
“Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?” Hannity said. “I feel sorry for your child.”
Santa Barbara Independent article from June 22, 1989 on Sean Hannity being kicked off the air at KCSB. (Santa Barbara Independent )
Later in the hour, Hannity added that “anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is just a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. . . . These disgusting people.”
May-Chang asked the station to silence Hannity. “For me, the goal was ‘Get this guy off the air, he’s fomenting hatred,’ ” she said. “In retrospect, the higher thing was the First Amendment, but at the time, what he was saying was just abhorrent.”
The station’s student manager told Hannity he was being taken off the air. The young host did not take the news well. “He was extremely upset,” recalled the manager, who declined to have his name published. “I thought he was going to hit me.”
Even though some of its leaders found Hannity’s message reprehensible, the ACLU took his case and informed the university it would sue, alleging discrimination against Hannity’s conservative views. Hannity was called before a university board that governed the station.
“The station did not like my opinions,” Hannity argued, according to a transcript of the board hearing. “I stood for conservative, traditional, loving family values.”
Under pressure from the ACLU, the university counsel “just wanted us to do whatever Sean wanted,” said Elizabeth Robinson, the KCSB manager. “They didn’t want to be on the wrong side of a First Amendment case.” The board concluded that Hannity had been improperly removed and offered to put him back on the air. But Hannity demanded a public apology and double his old airtime. The station stuck with its initial offer, which Hannity rejected.
“We were gleeful,” May-Chang said. “We thought that was the end of him.”
Finished with Santa Barbara, Hannity put an ad in the trade magazine Radio & Records, promoting himself as “the most talked-about college radio host in America.”
From then on, Hannity, who declined to be interviewed for this article, would portray the KCSB chapter as a symbol of liberal intolerance. The ACLU’s role was written out of the story, unmentioned in his own account.
Years later, Hannity accused his liberal foil on their Fox News show, Alan Colmes, of being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Colmes said he was proud to be a member, “because they defend all free speech.”
“No, they don’t, actually,” Hannity replied.
Robinson lost track of Hannity. Seven years later, when she saw him for the first time on Fox News, she said she saw “nothing surprising. The older we get, the more we become who we were.”
Hannity during the "Hannitization Tour '03 Sean Hannity Live!" in March 2003 in Redondo Beach, Calif. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
{In 1990, Bill Dunnavent was trying to bring a relatively new concept to northern Alabama — highly opinionated political talk radio. Three years earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which for nearly four decades had required broadcasters to provide equal time to people who disagreed with views expressed on the air. The rules kept political talk on the airwaves within civil bounds, some people said. Others said it unfairly limited debate, keeping it dull and centrist.}:
Dunnavent advertised for show hosts, got more than 50 tapes from eager young talkers, and narrowed the field to two candidates. One had a distinctive New York accent, a Joe Sixpack affect, and a collection of headlines from California that proved he could win attention.
“I hired Sean because he had enough guts to stand up for his convictions and because he sounded different from everybody else in our area,” said Dunnavent, who put Hannity on WVNN in the afternoons and paid him $19,000 a year.
The station owner told his new hire he had only two rules: “We don’t talk about religion, and we don’t talk about abortion.”
One day soon after Hannity had started work in Huntsville, Dunnavent flipped on his car radio to hear the kid interviewing a madam from the Mustang Ranch brothel in Nevada.
“I found a pay phone and told him, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ ” the owner recalled. “He was doing what he does, pushing the envelope. Sean understood that the job is to say something that evokes someone’s emotions.”
Hannity started out “very raw,” Dunnavent said, but improved dramatically over a couple of years, becoming the area’s top-rated host. His official station biography said that he “made a proud name for himself by insulting lesbians.” (“Over the years, I have evolved into more of a libertarian when it comes to people’s personal lives,” Hannity said in 2013.)
Hannity met his future wife, Jill Rhodes, in Huntsville, where she was a newspaper columnist. At a prenuptial meeting, Hannity lit into their minister, arguing that the church had become too liberal. The pastor suggested that Jill was “crazy to be marrying this guy” and she left the session in tears, Hannity later said.
In 1992, a salesman who’d been driving through northern Alabama called up Eric Seidel, the station manager at WGST in Atlanta, and told him about a great guy on the radio in Huntsville.
Seidel happened to have a cassette Hannity had sent him. The manager popped it into his tape deck and heard an eager talent with strong conservative views and a knack for landing big-name guests, including the voluble local congressman, Newt Gingrich. Seidel hired the kid just as right-wing radio voices were becoming an alternative to traditional news media, a battalion arrayed against Bill Clinton, his wife, and their liberal, multicultural vision.
Hannity’s show had a lot of rough edges at first. He would get angry at callers and hang up on them. His righteousness, blue-collar Long Island diction, and plain-spoken rhetoric struck his Georgia audience as refreshingly authentic, Seidel said: “Sean’s not somebody who’s going to make you laugh a lot. He’s not like Rush. There was a blue-collar nature to his family.”
Hannity was also extremely competitive. In Atlanta, he’d listen to promos for his main competitor, Neal Boortz at WSB, and counterprogram his own show. When Boortz booked Robert Shapiro, O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, for a 10 a.m. interview, Hannity called the lawyer’s PR rep and begged for a 9 a.m. slot with Shapiro. He not only beat the competition by an hour, but Hannity kept extending the interview, making Shapiro late to the Boortz show.
Boortz and Hannity competed for the same audience — conservative men — but their approaches were radically different. “I would tell Sean, ‘I am here to attract a large audience so the station can play commercials for them,’ ” Boortz said. “Sean is truly, truly there to save the country. . . . His whole appeal is two words: Earnest and honest. I have never heard Sean say anything off the air that was different from what he’s said on air.”
Hannity interviews Sarah Palin in 2009. (Shealah Craighead/FOX NEWS CHANNEL)
{Few listeners feel a connection to the personal lives of Rush Limbaugh, with his stories about his Palm Beach, Fla. estate and private jets, or Glenn Beck, with his armored cars and guard dogs. But when Hannity talks about his martial arts practice or his beer drinking or his afternoons spent hauling his kids to sports practice, he makes a regular-guy connection that sticks.}:
“He’s easy to listen to,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that has tracked Hannity for decades. “There aren’t a lot of complicated narratives like Beck or Limbaugh. He doesn’t claim to be the expert on anything. He’s just kind of a guy.”
Hannity proudly says he never backs away from a battle, but he leavens his aggressive side with the occasional you-got-me shrug. In September, Hannity asked a guest, a radio psychologist, to diagnose Hillary Clinton’s mental health.
“You can’t do that,” interrupted another guest. “You don’t like it when people say Trump is insane.”
“Okay,” Hannity said — flashing his impish smile — and dropped the topic.
Though he’s fixed in the public mind as a TV talker, Hannity is the nation’s second-highest-rated radio host, behind only Limbaugh. He’s No. 1 in the key 25-54 audience among cable news shows. He makes $36 million a year, according to Forbes, which ranked him No. 77 among the world’s top-paid celebrities. (Two other radio hosts, Howard Stern and Limbaugh, made the top 100, both way above Hannity’s pay grade.)
But like the president, Hannity retains enough blue-collar cred to position himself as a scrappy fighter for the regular guy. “My overpaid friends in the media, well, they have their chauffeur-driven limousines, they like their fine steakhouses and expensive-wine lifestyles,” he told viewers last fall. “The people you’re watching on TV” do not feel your pain. “And therein lies the contempt.”
Hannity grew up on Long Island, son of a probation officer and a homemaker. Something of a troublemaker as a kid, he and his pals would go “skitching,” grabbing onto the bumpers of passing cars to hitch a ride.
He was a news junkie, delivering the New York Daily News and Long Island Press, listening deep into the night to the pioneers of raucous talk radio. His heroes were rabble-rousers such as Bob Grant, famous for shouting “Get off my phone!” and dumping callers who annoyed him. As a teenager, Hannity would call in to the shows, testing his conservative arguments.
Gingrich, who got to know Hannity in 1990 and has remained a frequent guest, said the connection Hannity forged with Trump “is the New York thing. They talk the same language. I can’t possibly interact with the president in that same way that Sean can.”
Hannity’s big move up came courtesy of a fellow talk-radio fan, Roger Ailes, who created Fox News for owner Rupert Murdoch in 1996 and essentially translated conservative radio to a TV format. Ailes hired Hannity to host a debate show that the new network initially referred to internally as “Hannity and LTBD” — “liberal to be determined.” That turned out to be Alan Colmes, who shared the 9 p.m. hour with Hannity until 2009, when Hannity went solo.
Hannity has done one hour of TV and three of radio every day for 21 years. Through the George W. Bush years, he loyally supported the president’s policies. Then, during the Obama presidency, Hannity’s tone shifted. He leaned more heavily on stories he believed were being given short shrift by the “liberal media” — stories about where Obama was born, and who deserved blame for the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.
It wasn’t winning over a new audience. By 2013, Hannity’s audience was shrinking; it was the year after a presidential election, when cable news numbers typically droop, but Fox News, still under Ailes’s iron leadership, was talking about changing the channel’s approach.
“We are beginning to dramatically change the way news is presented to the public,” Ailes wrote in a memo announcing that Hannity would move from 9 p.m., the heart of prime time, to 10 p.m., losing the cherished time slot to Megyn Kelly, who, Fox hoped, might lure a younger audience. Kelly’s numbers soared. Hannity’s fell by a quarter between 2009 and 2014.
Four years later, Kelly is gone, moved to NBC; Ailes is dead, having spent his final months denying sexual harassment allegations, which also felled former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Hannity is the only remaining original prime-time talk show host from Fox’s launch.
Last month, he returned to his 9 p.m. home, making way for Laura Ingraham to take over the 10 p.m. slot. His numbers are back, and a drive last spring to get his advertisers to dump him seems now to have been a bump in the road.
Hannity’s comeback coincided with his early, eager embrace of his fellow New Yorker. As early as the fall of 2015, Hannity wore a Trump-brand necktie to interview the upstart candidate at the CPAC convention in Maryland. As some conservative talk hosts pronounced themselves Never Trumpers or came to his side late and halfheartedly, Hannity went all in.
Hannity had come to see conservatives as not just a political movement, but a cultural tribe. In 2008, he launched Hannidate, an online dating service “where people of like conservative minds can come together to meet.” It didn’t last long, but Hannity’s sense of his audience as vanguard of a crusade to restore a fading culture only strengthened. Hannity made his name as a movement conservative, but he was loyal to the first rule of talk shows: As radio host Mark Levin put it, “In this business, you don’t get out ahead of your audience.”
When Hannity “hitched his wagon to Trump,” Carusone said, “he got access and access brought ratings.” Trump insiders used Hannity’s show as their safe space. When things got hot, Donald Trump Jr., Sebastian Gorka and the candidate himself went on Hannity.
Trump attacked the Gold Star father, and Hannity stood by him. Trump went after a federal judge of Mexican descent, and Hannity backed him. Even after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged of Trump boasting about grabbing women, Hannity defended his guy: “King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud.”
After the inauguration, the first interview the new president gave to a cable news channel went to Hannity.
Hannity with former White House press secretary Sean Spicer in January 2017, days after President Trump’s inauguration. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Hannity’s “advocacy journalism” sometimes entails passing along stories that never quite check out. He used his TV show last year to promote the false rumor that Hillary Clinton was hiding a severe health crisis. He let Trump push the baseless idea that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination. “I saw that somewhere on the Internet,” Hannity said.
After the election, Hannity doubled down on his loyalty. He defended the administration’s false contention that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.
And Hannity spent many hours hawking a discredited theory whereby a murdered Democratic National Committee employee, Seth Rich, was said to have been killed by Democratic operatives because he supposedly had leaked emails that were embarrassing to Hillary Clinton. Fox News retracted its report that had lent credence to the theory, and police affirmed that the scenario had no validity; the murder was the result of a robbery gone bad.
Through much of the spring, Hannity kept at the story, backing off only after Media Matters urged his advertisers to pull their ads. Several did, though one, USAA insurance, returned to his show because “we heard from our members, and . . . the lines between news and commentary are increasingly blurred,” a company statement said.
In late May, Hannity, facing pressure from Rich’s parents, dropped the story. “Out of respect for the family’s wishes for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time,” Hannity said on TV. Fox News and Hannity declined to comment on the Rich coverage.
The Rich debacle led some people who know Hannity to believe that his time at Fox was nearing an end, that the next generation of the Murdoch family was looking to tone down the sensationalism. But Hannity has told friends he would never cave to those who want to take him down.
“I’ve told you for years what’s going on here,” Hannity said on the radio in May. “I’ve told you that every single conservative host on radio that you like and you listen to is being recorded every second of every day by these losers in their bathrobes or in their underwear . . . being paid to do it in the hope that we conservatives say one word, one sentence, one phrase that they don’t like and that they can then use to attack our advertisers in the hopes that our advertisers will bail out, the show becomes financially unfeasible and that the host gets fired.
“This is a kill shot. . . . This is to silence me.”
When Ted Koppel interviewed him in March, Hannity asked the CBS newsman, “You think I’m bad for America?”
“Yeah,” Koppel replied, “because you have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”
Like Hannity, Chip Franklin, a radio host at KGO in San Francisco, started out in the business as a conservative, but Franklin switched sides and now runs a liberal show. “I know Hannity knows that Koppel was right,” Franklin said.
“I’ve seen what happens to people like Hannity because I was seduced in the ’80s and ’90s when I was yelling about what Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky and things like that. I know Hannity knew that Obama was born in the United States. I know Hannity has the same facts we all do about the crowd size at the inauguration or the Russian connection. I know that because I knew him in New York and he was always a conservative, but not like this.
“And then he got in this boat and didn’t realize how strong the current was, and he couldn’t get off. Because people adore him now. Nobody around him wants him to change. So he doubles down. He can’t go against his audience because he’ll lose millions of dollars.”
(Stavros Damos/For The Washington Post)
“Donald Trump and Sean Hannity are both disrupters of the status quo,” said Kellyanne Conway, counsel to the president and an architect of the administration’s communications approach. “Disrupters project a strength and moxie that fascinates some people and causes envy in others.”
Trump watches and values Hannity’s show, she said: “Hannity’s monologues have caught our attention. There’s a deeper, investigative component, and in this predictably vanilla and mediocre media environment, somebody like Hannity can break through with a steady stream of undercovered stories.”
The administration uses Hannity’s show because that’s where Trump’s base is. “Sean gets programming and the president gets a platform for his message,” said a senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid. “But between the two men, it’s not a transactional relationship. They’re genuinely friends.”
Last spring, Fox News’s Howard Kurtz asked Hannity if there was “anything so far in the Trump presidency that’s disappointed you?”
“Not yet,” Hannity replied.
---
ggl 4 25
[### Has Sean Hannity's Trump support crossed the line?
The Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com › USA › Politics › 2016](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/0921/Has-Sean-Hannity-s-Trump-support-crossed-the-line)
Sep 23, 2016 — Conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has been a vocal supporter of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, but critics, ...
[### Sean Hannity
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Sean_Hannity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Hannity)
Sean Patrick Hannity (born December 30, 1961) is an American conservative television presenter, broadcaster and writer. He hosts The Sean Hannity Show, ...
The Sean Hannity Show · Hannity & Colmes · Ainsley Earhardt · Alan Colmes
[### US election 2016 daily briefing: Fox News stars in feud ...
BBC
https://www.bbc.com › election-us-2016-37570387](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37570387)
Oct 6, 2016 — Two of the conservative news channel's biggest stars have turned their sharp tongues on one another after Sean Hannity accused Megyn Kelly of being in league ...
[### Hannity apparently asked what to say on Election Day. ...
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2022/04/25](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/25/hannity-apparently-asked-what-say-election-day-then-he-said-it/)
Apr 25, 2022 — President Donald Trump listens Fox News's Sean Hannity during a rally on Nov. ... Hannity had endorsed Trump before the 2016 election, an odd act ...
[### Hannity: I'm voting for Trump
Politico
https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/06 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/sean-hannity-supports-trump-223763)
Jun 1, 2016 — Donald Trump on Tuesday sat down for an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, who made his support of Trump explicit.
[### The 45 most outrageous lines from Donald Trump's ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2019/04/26 › politics › donald-t...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/politics/donald-trump-sean-hannity-fox-news/index.html)
Apr 26, 2019 — Evoking the days of the 2016 campaign, President Donald Trump called into Sean Hannity's Fox News show on Thursday night and the two men ...
[### Hannity a no-show for Fox's election night coverage
AP News
https://apnews.com › ...](https://apnews.com/television-ca765b45b18c407da44c99b8603fa11a)
Nov 7, 2018 — NEW YORK (AP) — After Fox News Channel called Sean Hannity's appearance at a Trump rally on Monday an “unfortunate distraction,” a further ...
[### Hannity, Fox face ethical issues over Trump text revelations
Oregon Public Broadcasting - OPB
https://www.opb.org › article › 2022/01/05 › hannity-f...](https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/05/hannity-fox-face-ethical-issues-over-trump-text-revelations/)
Jan 5, 2022 — 5, 2022 3:05 p.m.. The revelation of text messages from Sean Hannity offering advice for former President Donald Trump raises ethical issues for ...
[### Sean Hannity campaigns on stage at Trump's Missouri rally ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2018/11/06 › media › trump-ral...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/media/trump-rally-missouri-hannity/index.html)
Nov 6, 2018 — Sean Hannity defied his own words on Monday, appearing on stage at President Donald Trump's final election rally after having said he ...
[### Hannity watches liberals' hissy fits over Trump win
YouTube · Fox News
1.5M+ views · 5 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3c-_KmHms8)
Fox News host Sean Hannity calls out the 'media mob' following President-elect Trump's victory on '*Hannity
---
---
wapo
when Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-Ohio) nomination for speaker came up for a full House vote on Tuesday, October 17, the far-right MAGA Republican didn't fare well. Democrats voted overwhelmingly to make House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) speaker, and the 20 Republicans who voted against Jordan favored Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana), former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) or other members of the GOP caucus.
That vote wasn't what far-right media figures like Fox News' Sean Hannity and "War Room" host Steve Bannon were hoping for. Hannity and Bannon had waged a concerted effort to bully and coerce House Republicans into voting for Jordan.
In an article published by Washington Post on October 18, reporters Sarah Ellison and Will Sommer cite Hannity and Bannon as examples of pundits who have helped fuel the chaos plaguing the GOP's House majority.
"Hannity's effort to personally whip up votes for Jordan highlights the central role that right-wing media has played in the weeks-long drama engulfing Capitol Hill over who will wield the speaker's gavel," Ellison and Sommer observe. "At each turn, conservative media figures such as Hannity and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon have injected high-profile disruption into a process that normally plays out quietly behind the scenes in Capitol Hill corridors."
On October 13, Hannity tweeted, "Any Member of Congress would be crazy to NOT support Jim Jordan for Speaker. He is a natural born principled leader who will lead house Republicans to unite vs the radical left on the house and senate. Call your member and tell them at 202-224-3121."
Bannon, on "War Room," urged listeners to turn up the heat on conservative Rep. Steve Womack — an Arkansas Republican and one of the holdouts — and said of the congressman, "You're in a super MAGA district. You gotta get your mind right." Womack, however, voted for Scalise on October 17.
"Over the weekend," Ellison and Sommer report, "Hannity reached out to several holdout lawmakers who were not supporting Jordan, while one of his producers contacted lawmakers with an e-mail asking why they weren’t backing him."
---
wapo
...The eventual rejection of the proposed Super Bowl commercial resulted in “by far” the most successful marketing effort in the company’s history, Hunter said during the deposition. “Nothing’s even close,” he said.
The online commentator’s video fiercely criticizing the NFL went viral, and the story about the banned Super Bowl ad reached tens of millions of people after it was featured on Fox News’s signature programs, such as “The Sean Hannity Show” and “The Five,” Hunter recounted in the deposition.
Within Daniel Defense, the publicity generated by the rejected Super Bowl ad was seen as a marketing coup that the owners sought to replicate, according to Thomas Carlson, who led the manufacturer’s marketing and communications from 2015 to 2017 and reported to Cindy Daniel, co-owner with her husband and CEO Marty Daniel.
“Cindy was always trying to figure out that kind of thing - what kind of PR stunt can we do to get a little more notoriety,” he told The Post.
Another key element of the company’s marketing strategy, he added, was to use images of military and tactical units holding Daniel Defense rifles. The AR-style rifles closely resemble their military counterparts, though the military version allows the shooter to fire more than one round with each pull of the trigger....
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/caitlyn-jenner/
new
no lnx twt
Sean Hannity echoed dangerous Kremlin claim pointing figured about the Russian-Ukrainian war
Fox News' Sean Hannity speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore
Meaghan Ellis March 19, 2022
Fox News' Sean Hannity added to the conservative misinformation dumpster fire when he attempted to criticize President Joe Biden by echoing claims similar to Russian government officials.
On Friday, March 18, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov spoke to a group of reporters where he appeared to share his reaction Biden describing Russian President Vladamir Putin as a "war criminal." Peskov argued that the description is a "personal insult" to the Russian authoritarian.
"We hear and see statements that are actually personal insults to President Putin," Peskov told reporters.
"Given such irritability from Mr. Biden, his fatigue and sometimes forgetfulness ... fatigue that leads to aggressive statements, we will not make harsh assessments, so as not to cause more aggression,” Peskov added.
Later that evening, Hannity highlighted Peskov's words on the screen as he echoed similar sentiments saying, “Like I’ve been saying, Biden’s weakness on the world stage is emboldening bad actors all across the globe."
Hannity's segment also came hours after Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov actually praised Fox News for echoing Russian propaganda. According to Lavrov, Fox News is the only television network focused on presenting an "alternative point of view."
“We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the Western countries to manipulate media,” said Lavrov. “If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view."
For months now, far-right Republican lawmakers and conservative Fox News hosts have had what is being described as a "lovefest" with Russia. Despite their opposition, the Democrats and Biden administration have made it a point to push back against Putin as his military continues its invasion of Ukraine.
hannity on defam suit: bring it on
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/sean-hannity-on-hillary-clinton/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-hillary-clinton/
played sp many x but cut coup plot
vax
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-warns-you-will-be-canceled-and-government-will-target-your-loved-ones-if-you
// trump before election says if lose must be rigged?
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-and-larry-elder-push-election-conspiracy-theories-california-recall
https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/fox-news-media/
iam sorry to report I've had more than one conversation with progressives who, despite being savvy and well-read, are under the mistaken impression that Fox News has seen the light and has started to promote the COVID-19 vaccine. I've even witnessed speculation that Rupert Murdoch, who is himself vaccinated, had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the Fox News brass about the wisdom of encouraging their own audience to contract a dangerous disease. And while I always enjoy a cheeky opportunity to tell folks they should be reading my work more, overall, it's distressing to see that people are buying into the myth that Fox News has "pivoted" to being pro-vaccine.
But can you blame folks for believing this? Someone who prides themselves on a responsible, fact-based diet of mainstream media sources like CNN, NBC News and NPR likely got exposed in mid-to-late July to misleading stories hyping an out-of-context clip of Fox News host Sean Hannity saying, "I believe in the science of vaccination" and urging viewers to "take COVID seriously." The clip also got shared widely on social media.
Everyone likes a "scared straight" story, and it just felt goodto believe conservatives were on the verge of giving up this anti-vaccination nonsense. Unforutantely, the story was B.S.
As Iand reporters who cover right wing media for Media Matters and Vox pointed out at the time, Hannity's show that night was not only bookmarked by two other shows — Laura Ingraham's and Tucker Carlson's — that openly discouraged vaccination, but his supposedly "pro-vaccine" comments came in the middle of a segment that overall portrayed vaccines as dangerous and a threat to freedom. Even in the edited clip, Hannity instructed his viewers to "research like crazy," which is**a common anti-vaxx rhetorical trick**. As with creationists claiming they want to "teach the controversy," it's a way to seem reasonable while slyly directing people to engage conspiracy theories and suggesting those conspiracy theories are on equal footing, credibility-wise, as scientific fact. **As Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times** wrote, Hannity was basically "encouraging listeners to expose themselves to the wide variety of anti-vax conspiracy mongering accessible on social media via 'research.'"
But in case there was any doubt, a perusal of Hannity's programming in the weeks since his supposed conversion shows that, actually, Hannity is still largely focused on stoking confusion, spreading misinformation, and portraying vaccination efforts as a liberal conspiracy against his audience. As Media Matters documented on Tuesday, Hannity gave an entire hour of his radio show over to two anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists — men who use phrases like "the demon needle" and "poisonous jabs." Hannity presented them falsely as medical experts to people calling in looking for advice. He also sneered at Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, calling him "flip-flop Fauci" and declaring that his anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists were better experts. The conspiracy theorists discouraged vaccines for young people, implied that dangerous and unproven drugs are superior prevention to the vaccine, and lied about the breakthrough infection rate, implying it's high when it is not.
This in in line with the general approach to the vaccine question on Hannity's show. From the moment that his misleading "pro-vaccine" clip went viral, Hannity has aggressively downplayedthe claim that he's promoting the vaccine, declaring two days after the initial clipthat, "I'm not urging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine" and "I have never told anyone to get a vaccine." In the past few weeks, he's attacked vaccine passport programs, portrayed vaccine advocacy as "threats coming from Democrats," exaggerated the risks of breakthrough infections, and even claimed that vaccine passport programs are racist against Black people. (In reality, Black people are at a higher risk of dying of COVID-19, which is one reason why aggressive public health measures are necessary.)
A visit to Hannity's Facebook page is more of the same. It features a post mocking New York City mayor Bill De Blasio for supposedly playing doctor by instituting a vaccine passport system, **Blames undocumented immigrants for the COVID-19 spread** when the medical establishment is quite clear that the problem is willfully unvaccinated people, and celebrates Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is selling merchandise mocking vaccine advocates and whose state is paying the price for his idiocy with some of the highest rates of COVID-19 in the country.
Overall, Hannity viewers get a strong message that vaccines are ineffective, dangerous, and getting one is just giving into those damn Democrats. And his firehose of anti-vaccination demagoguery is in line with the rest of Fox News, which continues to take the stance that vaccines are "a menace", ineffective, and that refusing vaccination is a good way to prove one's right wing bona fides.
And yet, this notion that the network has changed its tune has become received wisdom in much of the mainstream media.
Googling "Hannity vaccines" turns up a darkly funny mix of Fox News headlines demonizing vaccination and mainstream media headlines praising Fox News for being pro-vaccination. One of those more recent ones, from Morning Consult, even announces, "Fox News Personalities Started to Promote COVID-19 Vaccines. Viewers Have Taken Notice." The article declares that "some conservative media personalities have gone all in on vaccines," falsely citing Hannity as an example. It credits this supposed shift in messaging for the fact that vaccine "reluctance fell to an all-time low this week among adults who watch Fox News: 27 percent of viewers now say they probably or definitely won't get vaccinated, down from 30 percent the week before and a high of 37 percent in mid-March." That's certainly an improvement, but hard to say if Fox News is really the cause, since their much-ballyhooed "shift" is an illusion propped up to bamboozle the mainstream media and not actually representative of the vaccine-negative messaging their audience actually gets. The comments from his fans on Facebook make quite clear what message they're getting, and it's definitely not that vaccination is good and that unvaccinated people are the cause of the current surge. Instead, it's fear-mongering about the shots, blaming immigrants and not the unvaccinated, and comparing vaccine passports and mandates to Nazi Germany.
As the New York Times reports, fears of the delta variant are also driving a lot of red state Americans to get the shot, clearly deciding that sticking it to the liberals isn't worth getting sick over. The article also points out that "employers and universities have started requiring the shots to return to work and class." Even the phrase "pandemic of the unvaccinated," which is being heavily (and accurately) promoted by the White House and the Centers for Disease Control, likely deserves credit for underscoring to the unvaccinated that it's they, not hated liberals, who are paying the price for listening to Fox News.
So this is probably not a matter of one pro-vaccine Hannity clip in a sea of anti-vaccine messaging changing minds. It's just that even the most devout death cults eventually have some members who start to question the wisdom of sacrificing themselves for some dumb ideology. Let's hope that the number of Fox News fans deciding they have their limits only continues to rise.
===
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ron-johnson-vaccines/
no lnx
"Go get vaccinated, America," the president urged the nation last Wednesday in his State of the Union address. Joe Biden had a lot of good news to report to the US Congress on the COVID vaccination effort: 220 million shots have been administered in his first 100 days in office, everyone over 16 is eligible and 90 percent of Americans now live within five miles of a vaccination site. Vaccine manufacturing is booming. Supply will soon no longer be a limiting factor. Yet even as eligibility has expanded, demand has plateaued across the country and vaccination rates have dipped from their peak.
Time is of the essence. More transmissible variants of the virus mean a higher percentage of the population must be immunized to reach herd immunity. We're in a race between the finest that human civilization has to offer and venal dumbassery.
In one corner is science, bolstered by billions in public investment. Eighteen months ago, there were no vaccines for human coronaviruses. Today, there are multiple safe, highly-effective COVID shots. Better yet, thanks to wise public policy and all-hands-on-deck roll-out, they're available for free to any American adult. The president even announced tax credits to reimburse small- and mid-sized businesses that give their employees paid time off to get vaccinated and to recover from vaccine side effects.
In the opposite corner are demagogues, clout-chasers and magical thinkers. These operators think they can gain political power, attention and, in some cases, money by undermining vaccinations against a disease that has killed more than 588,000 people.
Power-hungry Republicans like United States Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin are positioning themselves as heirs to Donald Trump by opposing vaccinations. Johnson recently told a conservative radio host that distribution should have been limited to the truly vulnerable and he questioned the need for broad-based vaccination.
Johnson also attacked the civic-minded values behind the push for herd immunity. "What is it to you? You have got a vaccine and science is telling you it's very, very effective," Johnson asked, "So, why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?" The answer is obviously herd immunity, which offers protection for those who can't get vaccinated or whose immune systems can't respond to the vaccine.
It's a shrewd bet. Forty-two percent of Republicans say they probably or definitely wouldn't get a shot, even if it's shown to be safe. The "even if shown to be safe" proviso speaks volumes. Some Republicans claim to be against vaccination as a matter of personal liberty, but nobody's forcing them to get vaccinated. It's all rationalization.
Vaccine refusal is a tribal touchstone, even as vaccine hesitancy ebbs generally. Indeed, last summer's heavily armed anti-lockdown sieges of state legislatures were the dress rehearsals for the January 6 insurgency. Rejecting vaccines is about values, not facts. These right-wingers reject vaccines because vaccines represent science, the welfare state and the common good, which are antithetical to everything they hold dear.
Johnson isn't the only Republican riding anti-vaccine paranoia. Perhaps the perfect example of how vaccine denialism furthers extreme right-wing political ambition is Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano, who freely mixes anti-government and anti-vaccine sentiment. Mastriano beat the rush and came out against the COVID vaccine before it existed. He was also a central player in the bid to steal the election for Trump. (He actually had to be pulled out of a meeting with then-president Trump because he was found to be suffering from COVID.) But he recovered enough to organize bus transportation for the January 6 insurrection. Mastriano's antics have transformed him from an obscure legislator to a gubernatorial hopeful.
State legislators in 40 states have introduced bills that would undermine vaccine mandates. These bills are to legislating what vaccine denialism is to science. Few will become law, but they are potent messaging designed to further politicize vaccination.
Some entertainers are also milking COVID denialism for ratings and notoriety. Podcaster Joe Rogan, a UFC commentator better known for his takes on elk meat and DMT, and his willingness to host conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, opined that, "If you're, like, 21 years old, and you say to me, 'Should I get vaccinated?' I'll go no."
Rogan has 11 million listeners, many of them young. Predictably, Fox host Tucker Carlson defended Rogan's attempt to poison public understanding of vaccinations. Even Sean Hannity, who claims he's not anti-vaxx, flirted with vaccine denialism Tuesday, falsely suggesting there might not be any science behind the vaccine....
key in getting flynn sprung?
hannity continues his obsession with private jets
On the April 22 edition of his program, host Sean Hannity leaned into one of Fox’s oldest chestnuts --
-- and targeted one of the network’s favorite climate villains, John Kerry. In the segment, Fox News correspondent Trace Gallagher detailed the travel habits and calculated the carbon output of both Kerry and billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s private jet use. vid]
the segment calls back to a scandal Fox manufactured in February around Kerry’s private jet travel and falls in line with the network’s history of using private jet travel to pivot any discussion on the climate crisis to the “hypocrisy” of “elites” and “liberals” who advocate climate solutions. While attempting to falsely portray politicians and wealthy celebrities as the face of the climate movement, the attack ignores the millions of people around the world harmed by climate change and environmental injustice.
To be clear, use of private jets by those advocating for climate action should be critiqued. But whether or not using private transportation is hypocrisy by climate advocates is not the point. In reality, individual action is wholly inadequate for addressing the scale of the climate crisis when 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. The crisis requires, above all, systemic policy responses that can be implemented only by governments.
Laura Ingraham mocks young climate activists
On the April 22 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham focused her monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. Her final point was targeted at young activists who are calling for urgent and bold action -- and she took specific aim at Greta Thunberg and a Mexican climate justice activist named Xiye Bastida.
Ingraham suggested that today’s youths are being “indoctrinated into critical climate theory just like critical race theory.” Not to be outdone by Carlson, Ingraham introduced the clip of Bastida talking about the role of justice in developing climate solutions like this: “What happens when you mix open-borders madness, critical race theory, and climate paranoia all together in one big bowl? You get this." vid]
ingraham’s callous attacks on climate and youth activists are not new. She received significant blowback in 2019 for comments she made about Thunberg and in 2018 for mocking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.
The biggest problem with Fox’s “War on Earth Day'' is that it is not limited to once a year. Daily Fox assaults erode public acceptance of climate science and the need for urgent and bold action on climate change. Far from being a news outlet, the outlet is a key cog in the right-wing disinformation machine and climate obstruction is one of its main goals.
mma 521 illeg aliens vote replace us HR1
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-doubles-down-vaccine-efficacy-conspiracy-theory-citing-masks-and-social
consulted for what exactly?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/abbott/
no lnx
Greg Abbott consulted an infamous climate change denier before Texas energy debacle: reporter
Alex Henderson March 17, 2021
Gov. Greg Abbott has drawn a great deal of criticism from Texas Democrats, including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke, over his response to the Lone Star State's recent energy debacle — which found millions of Texas without heat, electricity and running water during freezing temperatures. And according to Madlin Mekelburg, an environmental reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, one of the people Abbott consulted before the cold snap was Joe Bastardi — a meteorologist known for being a climate change denier.
Abbott, during the crisis, claimed that green energy was to blame for the widespread power outages that Texas was suffering. But as O'Rourke pointed out, only a fraction of Texas' energy comes from wind power — the state is much more reliant on fossil fuels. And the state's power grid, O'Rourke stressed, suffered across-the-board problems because it hadn't been properly winterized.
Bastardi, reporter Abigail Rosenthal notes on the My San Antonio website, is someone who was recommended to Abbott by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Fox News' Sean Hannity. The meteorologist has said that if changes in climate occur, they do so naturally — claiming that use of fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Scientists all over the world, however, have been warning that fossil fuels are a key factor in climate change.
Hannity, in fact, wrote the forward for Bastardi's book, "The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War" — which has drawn a great deal of criticism from scientists. Bastardi has appeared on Hannity's show more than once.
Mekelburg reports that Abbott and Bastardi spoke on February 12, which was a few days before the freezing temperatures arrived in Texas. And Bastardi, according to Mekelburg, told the Texas governor to expect "a winter version of a Category 5 hurricane."
During the cold snap, major Texas cities like Houston, Austin and San Antonio experienced afternoon highs of around 33F or 34F — which wouldn't be unusual for Pittsburgh or Detroit in February, but was unusually cold for cities in South Texas. Unlike states that were used to coping with icy, freezing weather, Texas did not winterize its power system — and its power grid failed.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/sean-hannity/
college tennis lk forest
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-media-2649880889
...Media Matters has a good round-up of the various strategies being employed by right wing media to spin Wednesday's events as something less serious than an attempted coup spurred on by Trump himself.
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Fox News' Tucker Carlson is reframing the insurrectionistsas the real victims, subject to imaginary liberal incursions on vaguely defined "freedom." Laura Ingraham is working the "both sides do it" angle, falsely equating random and disorganized acts of vandalism during Black Lives Matter protests with the Trump crowd's direct attempt to overthrow the U.S. government and likely murder congressional leaders.
**Sean Hannity is still working the "antifa did it!" lie**,even after the FBI announced no evidence linking anti-fascist activists to the Trump-motivated mob. And Rush :{Limbaugh:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: is denying that the insurrection was violent, saying it was simply people taking "selfies," ignoring the fact that five people died, including a Capitol police officer who was beat to death by someone wielding a fire extinguisher. These tactics of deflection also ignore that the mob clearly intended more mayhem— rioters weren't carrying weapons and wearing armor for their health — and it was only a matter of luck that things didn't get worse.
Unfortunately, such right-wing media pressure campaigns have worked, going back at least to the 1990s, when a campaign by figures like Rush Limbaugh to downplay Timothy McVeigh's 1995 terrorist attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City effectively shut down needed discourse about the role that extremist rhetoric on the right played in the attack.
Similarly, feigned outrage on the right over an FBI reportin 2009 over the threat of domestic terrorism from returning veterans caused the Obama administration to buckle, withdrawing the report. Since then, there's been an air of heightened skepticism in mainstream media towards efforts by progressive activists to highlight the growing threat of domestic terrorism. Mainstream journalists have tended, all too often, to treat those warnings as hysterical, even in the face of terrorist attacks in El Paso and Pittsburgh.
Right-wing efforts to minimize right-wing violence can work, so Democrats need to act swiftly to take control of the narrative. Republicans must not be allowed to rewrite history to minimize the seriousness of this situation. And the best possible tool that Democrats have right now to evade right-wing gaslighting is impeachment.
The good news is that Democrats seem to understand this. After giving Vice President Mike Pence the whole weekend to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office, House Democrats announced that they would be introducing an article of impeachment on Monday, accusing Trump of "incitement of insurrection." Still, there still seems to be some desire on the part of House Democrats to give Pence another 24 hours, leading to a confusing timeline where the impeachment is likely not to be brought to the floor until Tuesday....
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/sean-hannity-hyped-massive-trump-rallies-have-been-linked-covid-19-outbreaks
==
recall gingrich took out Wright tho had (had?) done worse?
an 1020 rnc bought 1m$ books hannity
part of pension plan?
https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/james-okeefes-videos-attacking-mail-voting-minnesota-fall-apart-after
no lnx many pix
James O’Keefe’s videos attacking mail-in voting in Minnesota fall apart after being spread by right-wing media
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 10/07/20
Serial political fraudster James O’Keefe, founder of the right-wing group Project Veritas, is now facing the collapse of yet another of his purported “sting” videos — this time, involving accusations of ballot fraud and bribery in Minneapolis. But the fraud and bribery might really be coming from Project Veritas itself.
About Project Veritas
Project Veritas’ basic modus operandi is to secretly record videos, then deceptively edit and release them in order to create a “gotcha” moment for right-wing media. These attempts often backfire. [Business Insider, 11/28/17]
Project Veritas has a long history of distorting videos, claiming they show things they do not actually show, and deceptively editing secret recordings to make the subjects look worse. Project Veritas also has a history of targeting low-level volunteers and staff, then attributing uninformed statements to organizers higher up in authority. [Media Matters, 10/6/14]
Project Veritas refuses to ever release unedited videos, only clips. “We treat our raw video as the same as a reporter’s notebook and we do not release it,” said Project Veritas spokesman Neil McCabe. [Snopes, 10/01/20]
Another O’Keefe stunt from earlier this year involved supposed inflation of coronavirus death statistics in New York City. Despite containing no evidence or meaningful information, it was widely picked up in right-wing media. [Media Matters, 4/30/20]
Project Veritas’ latest scheme is a project codenamed “Diamond Dog” meant to discredit mail-in voting. The intention of this scheme is “literally to get Trump reelected,” as a source said. [The New Republic, 8/3/20]
Project Veritas’ latest claims
O’Keefe’s first new video claimed to implicate an “Ilhan Omar connected Ballot Harvester.” The video featured Snapchat videos by a man referred to as “Liban Mohamed” with absentee ballots collected in his car. Though he is described as “connected” to Omar, he identifies himself in an audio clip as working for his brother Jamal Osman’s successful campaign in an August special election for the Minneapolis city council. [YouTube, 9/27/20]
A second video claimed to show an exchange of $200 for a single vote. Both videos relied heavily on the statements of a community “insider” named Omar Jamal. O’Keefe claimed that “our sources inside the Somali community here allege that the architect of this pay-for-votes scheme is none other than U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.” [YouTube, 9/28/20]
The new video releases appear to have been promoted beforehand with Trump campaign officials. The latest Project Veritas release was teased on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and businessman Mike Lindell, Trump’s Minnesota campaign chair. [Election Integrity Partnership, 9/29/20]
The videos’ release may have been moved ahead of schedule to distract from The New York Times’ reporting on Trump’s personal finances.“Mr. O’Keefe’s promotional posts had said the video would be released on Monday, but Project Veritas released it on Sunday instead, a few hours after the publication of The Times’s investigation. … Many of the same accounts that had shared promotional tweets also shared the video as soon as it was released, moving it quickly into Twitter’s trending topics alongside The Times’s tax investigation.” [The New York Times, 9/29/20]
Fact-checking Project Veritas’ claims
The collection of absentee ballots by a designated person who delivers them to be counted, which right-wing media refer to as “ballot harvesting,” was legal in Minnesota for a period this summer, during which the man in the Snapchat videos claims to have been working. The Minnesota Supreme Court reinstated a limit on collecting ballots in early September, after the state’s primary election had already taken place. [Star Tribune, 9/9/20]
Project Veritas has provided no direct evidence for any vote-buying. Any such allegations in the video “come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown.” [The New York Times, 9/29/20]
Now, “Liban Mohamed” has come forward — though his name is actually Liban Osman, and he was not working for Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign. Osman also said that Project Veritas misleadingly edited together two different videos he had taken a month apart from each other, as he boasted of his brother’s campaign and its successful fundraising against a wide field of 11 opponents. [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]
An Omar campaign spokesperson confirmed that Liban Osman had never worked or volunteered for Omar’s campaign. [Snopes, 10/1/20]
Liban Osman says Project Veritas’ main “insider” source, Omar Jamal, had offered him a bribe of $10,000, to be paid by Project Veritas. Osman says Jamal wanted him to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, and claims Jamal said to him, “They [Project Veritas] are not after you or your brother. Why are you defending her?” Project Veritas is denying the accusation. [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]
Video file
CitationVia Fox 9, KMSP-TV, October 5, 2020
KMSP-TV in Minneapolis reports that the video showing an exchange of $200 was actually Project Veritas' source, Omar Jamal. “But two sources tell the FOX 9 Investigators the man is a relative of Omar Jamal, and that during the encounter outside Cedar Riverside Apartments, it is Jamal who is handing the man $200 which was intended for the family of a sick relative in Somalia.” [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]
Project Veritas’ source Omar Jamal
Omar Jamal claims to be the chairman of “Somali Watchdog Group,” but the organization does not appear to exist. It is also unclear if Jamal is at all associated with the Ramsey County Sheriff Department, which he claims to be working for in the Project Veritas video. “Further, according to records obtained by the Daily Dot, Jamal isn’t currently a U.N. Permanent Representative to the Federal Republic of Somalia, which he has also claimed on LinkedIn.”[Daily Dot, 10/1/20]
Jamal has also admitted the video purportedly showing an exchange of $200 for a ballot was a staged dramatization. “I think that incident was one that was depicting how [cash-for-ballot] works,” he said in an interview with a Somali American TV program. He also admitted that he had never met anyone who had received cash in exchange for a vote. [Sahan Journal, 10/1/20]
Project Veritas is now promoting a GoFundMe for their “#BallotHarvesting Insider Omar Jamal,” with a goal of $500,000. The money is allegedly to support efforts to “further expose potentially more election fraud come November.” At time of writing, it has raised just over $31,000. [Twitter, 9/28/20]
Right-wing media and President Donald Trump spread the latest apparent hoax from Project Veritas
On September 28, O’Keefe appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, to promote the video. [Fox News, Hannity, 9/28/20]
Video file
CitationFrom the September 28, 2020, edition of Fox News' Hannity
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones hosted O’Keefe to talk about the story. [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 9/28/20]
Video file
CitationFrom the September 28, 2020, edition of InfoWars’ The Alex Jones Show
O’Keefe was interviewed by former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch. [YouTube, 9/28/20]
O’Keefe also appeared on The Larry Elder Show. [YouTube, 9/29/20]
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon hosted Project Veritas’ Neil McCabe to discuss the story on his War Room: Pandemic podcast. [Twitter, 9/28/20]
Far-right blogger and white nationalist sympathizer Michelle Malkin hosted state Rep. Steve Drazkowski (R-MN) to discuss the Project Veritas video. [YouTube, 9/28/20]
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Glenn Beck promoted the video on his Blaze TV show in a segment titled “Vote Buying In Ilhan Omar’s District?” [YouTube, 9/28/20]
screen grab
[New York Post, 9/27/20]
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[Breitbart, 9/27/20]
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[National Review, 9/27/20]
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[The Gateway Pundit, 9/27/20]
screen grab
[The Post Millennial, 9/27/20]
screen grab
[RedState, 9/28/20]
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[The Epoch Times, 9/28/20]
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[CBN, 9/28/20]
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[The Washington Times, 9/28/20]
Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool: “Trump Proven RIGHT After Video Shows Voter Fraud By Ilhan Omar Supporters, He DEMANDS Investigation” [YouTube, 9/28/20]“Trump Proven RIGHT After Video Shows Voter Fraud By Ilhan Omar Supporters, He DEMANDS Investigation” [YouTube, 9/28/20]
Pro-Trump cartoonist Scott Adams: “Trump Taxes, Mail-In Ballot Fraud Scandal, How Trump Wins Without Trying” [YouTube, 9/28/20]
Trump amplified the claims at his campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota. “And what about Omar? Where she gets caught [ballot] harvesting. What the hell is going on? I hope your U.S. attorney is involved,” Trump said, as the crowd chanted, “Lock her up.” [Vox, 10/1/20]
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), in a now-deleted tweet: “Project Veritas offers further evidence of the need to ban ballot harvesting. It's not a partisan issue. It's been abused to help both R & D candidates, including in North Carolina & California. Please help by telling your congressional rep to pass our bipartisan bill HR8285.” [Twitter, 9/28/20]
:{
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Gabbard posted a new tweet after the latest allegations broke about the videos:
https://www.mediamatters.org/james-okeefe/james-okeefe-cycle-after-sean-hannitys-eager-promotion-another-project-veritas-video
no vid
fox News star Sean Hannity hosted disgraced right-wing fabulist James O’Keefe last week to promote his latest video “sting,” which seeks to aid President Donald Trump’s reelection by undermining the credibility of U.S. elections. The video has since been discredited -- an incredibly predictable outcome for anyone remotely familiar with O’Keefe’s oeuvre -- but Hannity hasn’t bothered to let his audience know, because he’s a shill for the president.
Every news cycle about an O’Keefe “sting” video is the same (though every cycle about one of his efforts fizzling before launch is hilariously different). O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group targets a Democratic candidate, a progressive group, or a media outlet. His operatives use hidden cameras and leading questions to elicit responses from low-level participants that he can decontextualize and distort. His team edits together the footage into a video which he presents as damning evidence of widespread illegal or unethical behavior. The published result gets blasted through the right-wing infrastructure of social media storytellers, digital media outlets, and talk radio, moving up the food chain until it reaches Fox and the president. And then people take a closer look at the video and its participants and point out the particular ways in which O’Keefe has misled the public this time.
O’Keefe’s latest target is U.S. elections. His latest video is a two-part Project Veritas investigation into a “Cash For Ballots Voter Fraud Scheme” in the Somali American community in Minneapolis. And his latest wild allegation is that his team has identified “the biggest systemic voter fraud smoking gun in American history.”
There is no systemic voter fraud in the U.S. elections and mail-in voting is a secure way to cast ballots, despite the right-wing disinformation campaign to the contrary. And the videos in question are a mishmash of decontextualized snippets, some from anonymous individuals, which ultimately provide no “hard evidence of cash in exchange for votes.” Nonetheless, the video had rocketed through the right-wing noise machine to Hannity’s radio show, his Fox show, and the president in one day.
On his September 28 broadcast, Hannity presented O’Keefe as a credible investigator who had documented corruption. O’Keefe’s video, Hannity warned, “should scare every American.” After acknowledging that “Fox News has not independently verified the contents of the video,” he proceeded to show part of it to his millions of viewers. He brought on O’Keefe himself, who claimed he had produced “incontrovertible evidence” of “voter fraud” that is “all on tape.” “I hope the attorney general of the United States is watching tonight and will watch that video,” Hannity concluded at the end of the interview. “We need to get to the truth."
[vid]
and then the Project Veritas claims started to fall apart.
The “insider” at the center of O’Keefe’s tale who explains the purportedly crooked “scheme” is Omar Jamal, a local gadfly who presents himself as a leader in the Somali American community but has few apparent followers. Subsequent reporting revealed he isn’t a credible source, and he reportedly backtracked on key claims he made to O’Keefe in a subsequent interview -- notably, that he had ever seen cash exchanged for ballots. In fact, he “specifically alleges that he thinks a clip that purports to show a ‘ballot harvester’ paying a voter $200 in exchange for a vote was instead a demonstration of how that process allegedly works” -- a statement he may have been in good position to make, since he is reportedly the “ballot harvester” shown in the clip.
The local Fox owned-and-operated affiliate, KMSP, added to the implosion on Monday with an interview with Liban Osman, another subject of the Project Veritas videos. KMSP provided at least one clear-cut case of Project Veritas deceptively taking Osman out of context to suggest he had been offering money for votes, and Osman told the station that Jamal had offered him $10,000 from the group if he were to claim to be harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). “Project Veritas denies manipulating or misrepresenting its undercover video and claims it never offered Liban Osman $10,000,” KMSP reported.
Hannity’s audience hasn’t heard any of this from him, and they shouldn’t expect to. The Fox star knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s been promoting O’Keefe’s purported bombshells for years, despite his lack of credibility, because it’s propaganda intended to benefit the Republican Party, and Hannity is a Republican Party propagandist.
In this case, O’Keefe is the leading edge of an insidious and wide-ranging GOP plan to damage the credibility of absentee and mail-in ballot counts, suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and undermine confidence in the election results. As part of that effort, Project Veritas has “worked to infiltrate the groups of volunteers and paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups--a perfectly legal practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious ‘ballot harvesting,’” The New Republic reported over the summer.
That means we can expect more dubiously edited videos from O’Keefe’s crew in the month before the election -- and there’s little doubt he’ll be back on Hannity’s show to talk about it. That’s Fox’s role in the scheme -- an outlet willing to feed its viewers nonsensical, overblown attacks on the election process to benefit the president.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/is-fox-news-obsessed-with-hate-study-finds-network-uses-this-word-5-times-more-than-its-rivals/
no grafs
Tucker Carlson is a big fan of the phrase 'they hate.' Usually, he's talking about Democrats.
Curd Knüpfer, Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman, George Washington University
Fox News is up to five times more likely to use the word “hate" in its programming than its main competitors, according to our new study of how cable news channels use language.
Fox particularly uses the term when explaining opposition to Donald Trump. His opponents are said to “hate" Trump, his values and his followers.
Our research, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 8, 2020, initially explored news of Trump's impeachment. Then came the coronavirus. As we sifted through hundreds of cable news transcripts over five months, we noticed consistent differences between thevocabulary used on Fox News and that of MSNBC.
While their news agendas were largely similar, the words they used to describe these newsworthy events diverged greatly.
Fox and hate
For our study, we analyzed 1,088 program transcripts from the two ideologically branded channels – right-wing Fox and left-wing MSNBC – between 6 p.m. and 10:59 p.m.
Because polarized media diets contribute to partisan conflict, our quantitative analysis identified terms indicating antipathy or resentment, such as “dislike," “despise," “can't stand" and “hate."
We expected to find that both of the strongly ideological networks made use of such words, perhaps in different ways. Instead, we found that Fox used antipathy words five times more often than MSNBC. “Hate" really stood out: It appeared 647 times on Fox, compared to 118 on MSNBC.
Fox usually pairs certain words alongside “hate." The most notable was “they" – as in, “they hate." Fox used this phrase 101 times between January and May. MSNBC used it just five times.
To put these findings in historic context, we then used the GDELT Television database to search for occurrences of the phrase “they hate" on both networks going back to 2009. We included CNN for an additional comparison.
We found Fox's usage of “they hate" has increased over time, with a clear spike around the polarizing 2016 Trump-Clinton election.But Fox's use of “hate" really took off when Trump's presidency began. Beginning in January 2017, the mean usage of “they hate" on the network doubled.
'Us' versus 'them'
So who is doing all this hating – and why – according to Fox News?
Mainly, it's Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media. Though these groups do not actually have the same interests, ideology or job description, our analysis finds Fox lumps them together as the “they" in “they hate."
As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience – “you," “Christians" and “us" – as the target of animosity.Only 13 instances of “they hate" also cited a reason. Examples included “they can't accept the fact that he won" or “because we voted for [Trump]."
Citing liberal hate as a fact that needs no explanation serves to dismiss criticism of specific policies or events. It paints criticism or moral outrage directed at Trump as inherently irrational.
For loyal Fox viewers, these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.
Our data show intensely partisan hosts like Hannity and Carlson are more likely than other Fox anchors to use “they hate" in this way. Nevertheless, the phrase permeates Fox's evening programming, uttered by hosts, interviewees and Republican sources, all painting Trump critics not as legitimate opponents but hateful enemies working in bad faith.
By repeatedly telling its viewers they are bound together as objects of the contempt of a powerful and hateful left-leaning “elite," Fox has constructed two imagined communities. On the one side: Trump along with good folks under siege. On the other: nefarious Democrats, liberals, the left and mainstream media.
Research confirms that repeated exposure to polarized media messages can lead news consumers to form firm opinions and can foster what's called an “in-group" identity. The us-versus-them mentality, in turn, deepens feelings of antipathy toward the perceived “out-group."
The Pew Research Center reports an increasing tendency, especially among Republicans, to view members of the other party as immoral and unpatriotic. Pew also finds Republicans trust Fox News more than any other media outlet.
Americans' divergent media sources – and specifically Fox's “hate"-filled rhetoric – aren't solely to blame here. Cable news is part of a larger picture of heightened polarization, intense partisanship and paralysis in Congress. [vid "hate & hysteria]
Hannity portrays criticism of Donald Trump as hate-based.
Good business
Leaning into intense partisanship has been good for Fox News, though. In summer 2020 it was the country's most watched network. But using hate to explain the news is a dangerous business plan when shared crises demand Americans' empathy, negotiation and compromise.
Fox's talk of hate undermines democratic values like tolerance and reduces Americans' trust of their fellow citizens.
This fraying of social ties helps explain America's failures in managing the pandemic – and bodes badly for its handling of what seems likely to be a chaotic, divisive presidential election. In pitting its viewers against the rest of the country, Fox News works against potential solutions to the the very crises it covers.
Curd Knüpfer, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman, J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor Emeritus of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University
This article is republished from The Conversation
an 920
evidence suggests the Republican National Committee poured more than $400,000 into Sean Hannity’s latest book
Roger Sollenberger / Salon September 23, 2020
The Republican National Committee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars last month on books by Donald Trump Jr. and Fox News personality Sean Hannity, federal records show. The RNC’s August…
https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-antifa-and-black-lives-matter-thugs-are-going-be-clubbing-people-suburbs
Roger Stone: Antifa and Black Lives Matter “thugs” are going to be “clubbing” people in the suburbs to suppress voting
09/18/20 4:25 PM EDT
roger Stone continues to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare martial law
09/18/20 1:26 PM EDT
https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-continues-lay-groundwork-trump-declare-martial-law
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/warning-left-wing-coup-trumpist-media-prep-their-audience-election-unrest
no lnx many
Warning of a left-wing coup, Trumpist media prep their audience for election unrest
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 09/18/20 10:25 AM EDT
Trump
Molly Butler / Media Matters
Nearly 5 million people were watching on Tuesday night as a Fox News host who claims that white supremacy is a hoax and a former speechwriter for President Donald Trump who was fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference spun out a wild-eyed conspiracy theory portraying mail-in voting as a sinister Democratic cabal’s coup attempt.
Tucker Carlson opened the segment by telling his viewers that Democrats were promoting mail-in voting not as a way to boost safe turnout during a pandemic, but because “they want the uncertainty over the outcome of the election, so they can manipulate the results.” His guest, Revolver News’ Darren Beattie, then explained that “a very specific type of coup called the color revolution” is “unfolding before our eyes.”
A color revolution, Beattie explained, is “a regime change model favored by many in our national security apparatus, particularly against Eastern European countries to overthrow target regimes that they don't like.” (They were actually peaceful protests that toppled despots in places previously dominated by the Soviet Union.) And now, he claimed, that model is being applied to the United States, with “color revolution professionals” deliberately generating election fraud in order “to use lawfare in order to overturn the 2020 election.”
Right-wing media figures generally push a baseline level of apocalyptic rhetoric about the purported predations of progressives. But Trumpist media have reached a dangerous fever pitch over the last week or so, even by that standard. With polls showing Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden following the party conventions and the election only weeks away, commentators like Carlson are preparing their audiences to treat a Trump defeat as a left-wing coup -- and encouraging the president toward an authoritarian response.
Their deranged statements are fed by -- and fuel -- the president’s own unhinged remarks. Trump has portrayed himself as “saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.” He describes his political opposition as supporters of “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “left-wing cultural revolution” so dangerous that he has even endorsed extrajudicial executions.And all the while, he’s been openly claiming that he could not possibly lose a fairly held election, and that any defeat would be the result of a Democratic election fraud conspiracy.
Carlson’s show is the most prominent vehicle fearmongering about a Democratic coup, but it is not the only one. A new special from The Blaze TV’s Glenn Beck is titled “CIVIL WAR: The Way America Could End in 2020,” and it details how “the Left is grooming us for an Eastern European-style color revolution this election.” His complex plot sprawls over three chalkboards and features mail-in voting as a vector for “something dangerous happening in November if we don’t act now.” (Beck praised Carlson during the program for the way he has been “putting the puzzle pieces together.”) The Trumpist publication The Federalist has offered up a similar “coup” theory.
The right-wing “coup” talk is the natural result of their demagoguery and dehumanization of the political opposition. Months ago, Trumpist media figures began warning that civilization itself was on the ballot in the fall, with Trump standing as the only thing preventing the left from making America “unrecognizable.” That type of rhetoric has only escalated, producing ever-more-inflammatory claims about what Trump’s defeat might mean to the safety and security of his supporters.
Over the last week or so alone:
Carlson described Black Lives Matter as “poison” that “we have to fight” because “if we’re going to survive as a country, we must defeat this.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn explained that he bought a gun in case “100 or 200 people bent on violence” show up in his suburb.
Fox’s Laura Ingraham and the pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan baselessly attributed the massive western wildfires to left-wing arsonists, blasting false rumors circulating on social media to millions of viewers and listeners.
Fox contributor Dan Bongino claimed that “we're watching the greatest nation in the history of sentient beings collapse in front of our face.”
Fox host Sean Hannity said that U.S. cities have become “war zones” and that there is a “war on police now.”
And Charlie Kirk, a frequent Fox guest and head of the Trumpist youth group Turning Point USA, warned on his podcast that if Trump loses, leftists seeking “bloodthirsty revenge” will “come for us all. They will come for your children.”
Some are taking their hatred of the left to lawless, authoritarian conclusions.
Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, said during an appearance earlier this month on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network that if Trump were to lose (illegitimately as a result of voter fraud, of course), he should try to retain power by having federal agents seize purportedly tainted ballots, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.
Fox’s Mark Levin,meanwhile, has also urged Trump to consider invoking the Insurrection Act -- but he argued that it would be needed if he wins. “He will have to use it to put down the enemy,” Levin explained on his radio show last week.
“The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter, and the enemy is anybody that is going to use rioting, arson, looting, violence against our country to try to overthrow our country,” he added. “Those are traitors. That's treasonous.”
Extremist violent rhetoric is nothing new for right-wing media. Glenn Beck made it a staple of Fox News during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before the midterm elections, Fox warned its audience members that they needed to vote for Republicans to protect themselves from being killed by Democratic mobs.
But this sort of demagoguery can come with a heavy price. Beck’s rhetoric inspired an attempted domestic terror attack against one of his regular targets that ended with a firefight with law enforcement. And in the days before the 2018 midterm elections, a Trump superfan sent bombs to leftist leaders whom Fox commentators had attacked.
There’s still six weeks to go before the election. How will this spate of violent rhetoric end?
IN THIS ARTICLE
Voter Fraud and Suppression
Voter Suppression
Related
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07/21/20 3:52 PM EDT
Desperate Trumpists say civilization is on the ballot as Biden lead grows
06/24/20 11:06 AM EDT
How Tucker Carlson became the Fox host Trump listens to the most
07/08/20
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bad trinity pro nra ~ tish, ingm the worst w/ RUDY?!
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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177013
Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways
tags: Republican Party, voting rights, Donald Trump, Vote Suppression, voter intimidation
“Are you going to have poll watchers?” Hannity asked his friend during an interview clearly aimed at pulling viewers away from simultaneous coverage of the Democratic convention. “Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?”
“We’re going to have everything,” Trump replied. “We’re going to have sheriffs,and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.”
This, understandably, raised eyebrows. The president would send law enforcement to police polling stations? It’s a scenario that seems analogous to elections conducted by Eastern European strongmen, not by an elected official in the United States.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this claim, though.
The first is that, like so many of Trump’s wild assertions, he has made it before. In August 2016, he gave a speech in Altoona, Pa., in which he pledged to combat what he presented as endemic fraud in the state.
“We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said then, later adding another familiar refrain, that “the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?”
When he made the claim at the time, though, there was a significant roadblock to the plan. The Republican Party had been restricted from dispatching poll watchers to precincts for more than 30 years, the result of a lawsuit filed by the Democrats in 1981. Why? Because the Republican National Committee was using “poll watchers” in an effort to intimidate non-White voters....
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-says-postal-workers-cant-be-trusted-deliver-ballots
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-claims-concern-over-us-postal-service-part-preparations-military-overthrow
https://www.businessinsider.com/sean-hannity-trump-crazy-vaping-stelter-fox-news-book-2020-8
no lnx
'If you were hearing what I'm hearing, you'd be vaping too': Sean Hannity privately called Trump 'bats--- crazy,' according to a new book
Jake Lahut Aug 20, 2020, 7:37 AM
A new book details private conversations the Fox News host Sean Hannity had with friends in which he expressed dismay at what he was hearing from President Donald Trump.
"Early on in the Trump age, Hannity gained weight and vaped incessantly, which some members of his inner circle blamed on Trump-related stress," Brian Stelter, CNN's chief media correspondent, wrote in "Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth," set to be published next week.
The book — an excerpt of which was published by Vanity Fair on Thursday — says Hannity told a colleague, "If you were hearing what I'm hearing, you'd be vaping too."
"I barely get a word in," Hannity told another confidant of his conversations with Trump, Stelter wrote.
Seeking an escape from President Donald Trump's rambling monologues over the phone early in his presidency, the Fox News opinion host Sean Hannity turned to vaping and stress-eating, a new book from CNN's Brian Stelter says.
Stelter said he spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox News and 180 former employees and people "with direct ties to the network" for the book.
The book focuses on Trump's relationship with Hannity — "the president's 'shadow chief of staff,' as he was known around the White House," Stelter wrote.
The access Hannity enjoyed also came with some downsides, Stelter's sources said.
"Hannity counseled Trump at all hours of the day; one of his confidants said the president treated Hannity like Melania, a wife in a sexless marriage," he wrote. "Arguably, he treated Hannity better than Melania."
For all his pro-Trump coverage on his 9 p.m. show, Hannity, the longest-serving Fox News anchor, privately griped about the president, the book says.
"'Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a bats--- crazy person,' one of his associates said," Stelter wrote, adding that another friend told him, "Hannity has said to me more than once, 'he's crazy.'"
Hannity also told a colleague that on his calls with Trump, "I barely get a word in," the book says.
Trump, who often live-tweets Fox News programming, would also chat with Hannity as a fan.
"Trump was just like the rest of Hannity's viewers: He wanted more of Gregg Jarrett on the show, more of Dan Bongino, more of Newt Gingrich—the toadiest toads possible," Stelter wrote.
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boebert colo
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/sean-hannity-praises-and-coming-qanon-friendly-congressional-candidate
fox News’ Sean Hannity hosted Republican congressional candidate Lauren Boebert on his TV show — providing a prime-time platform to a candidate who has supported the violence-linked QAnon conspiracy theory.
The QAnon movement was name-checked in a leaked May 2019 FBI document highlighting the emergence of conspiracy theory-fueled domestic terrorism threats, and devotees have committed a number of murders, engaged in armed standoffs, and made politically motivated death threats. QAnon followers have vandalized churches, taken police on high-speed chases, and in one case, conspired with fellow followers to commit kidnapping.
Boebert is one of dozens of current or former 2020 congressional candidates who have expressed support for the conspiracy theory. Many of them, like Boebert, will be on the ballot in November.
Boebert has explicitly praised QAnon, and furthermore appeared on another QAnon YouTube show. She's tried to back away from those statements after winning her primary election, and this week got a helping hand from Hannity. He introduced Boebert as an “up-and-coming Colorado congressional candidate” who was “taking on the Washington swamp.” Hannity portrayed Boebert as the victim of unfair media attacks.
Also: Boebert is touting the endorsement of white nationalist and COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Tom Tancredo.
==
7/19/20
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/fox-news-peddled-misinformation-about-the-coronavirus-253-times-in-five-days-study/
A new study finds that Fox News peddled misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic 253 times in only five days. The documented instances included claims which undermined science and faith in experts, as well as demands that schools and businesses reopen at the risk of public health.
Primetime host Laura Ingraham, who has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, led the pack with about a quarter of the claims — 63 total, or just more than 12 per show. Additionally, the network’s “straight news” programs contributed about 35% of the misinformation.
The study, published Thursday by media watchdog Media Matters for America, was conducted from July 6 to 10 — the week after a Yahoo News report proclaimed that Fox’s coronavirus coverage had taken a “remarkable turn” for the better:
However haltingly and incompletely, the president’s favorite news outlet has started to acknowledge, across various programs and its news site, that the coronavirus is a far graver threat than even [President Donald] Trump himself will acknowledge.
That report cited two articles on the network’s website and two instances of Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy making remarks about masks that, while stopping short of endorsements, did not mock them outright.
The article also pointed out that Fox News requires its employees to wear masks at work most of the time. Additionally, the network appears to have canceled a Fox Nation show about the pandemic hosted by coronavirus conspiracy theorist Alex Berenson, though extant episodes remain available.
new study finds that Fox News peddled misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic 253 times in only five days. The documented instances included claims which undermined science and faith in experts, as well as demands that schools and businesses reopen at the risk of public health.
Primetime host Laura Ingraham, who has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, led the pack with about a quarter of the claims — 63 total, or just more than 12 per show. Additionally, the network’s “straight news” programs contributed about 35% of the misinformation.
The data in the Media Matters study flatly contradicts the isolated examples from the Yahoo report. Here is a quick breakdown:
- About half the incidents — 115 claims — challenged scientific consensus and undermined official government recommendations, such as social distancing and masking guidelines.
- “The Ingraham Angle” was the clear leader of the pack, pushing misinformation 63 times, more than half of which came from Ingraham herself, who undermined science a staggering 21 times in five days.
- “Fox & Friends” took second place with 45 instances; “Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” finished in a dead heat for third, clocking 21 and 20 instances, respectively.
- Straight news programs delivered more than a third of the misinformation, led by Martha MacCallum’s “The Story” with 20 claims.
- Eight claims defended or endorsed unproven remedies such as hydroxychloroquine, days after the FDA told people not to take it outside of hospitals or clinical trials.
- The network politicized the pandemic 63 times, including 51 claims that regulations requiring masks and closing businesses were rooted in politics and 10 false claims linking recent racial justice protests to a surge in new infections.
- Hosts advocated 34 times to disregard public health concerns in favor of reopening the country’s more than 100,000 K-12 schools.
The misinformation and the seeming coordination with official White House talking points has raised alarm among experts.
For instance, in a “Hannity” interview July 10, the last day covered in the study, Trump responded to a question about the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, by saying “he’s made a lot of mistakes.”
That interview fed an ongoing White House effort to discredit Fauci, who pushed back by calling such efforts “bizarre.”
“Ultimately, it hurts the president,” he said.
Then there is the matter of schools. The network and the administration, including Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for weeks trumpeted an American Academy of Pediatrics statement advising a measured reopening of schools.
The misinformation’s momentum eventually compelled the academy — together with with the two largest educators’ unions in the country and the School Superintendents Association — to clarify its statement. It now says that reopening “will clearly require substantial new investments in our schools and campuses,” and calls on Congress and the administration “to provide the federal resources needed” to safely educate and care for students.
In an earlier Media Matters audit of the cable network, Fox News posted a 20% decline in its coronavirus coverage between March and May.
But this unrelenting misinformation campaign comes amid a massive surge in COVID-19 infections, which has ravaged healthcare resources in Sun Belt states such as Arizona, California, Florida and Texas. In recent weeks, the U.S. has set seven records for daily new cases, topping 68,000 on July 10, the same day which Trump, who said on numerous occasions that the virus would “miraculously” disappear in April, told Hannity that Fauci had “made a lot of mistakes.”
Now, many states are walking back reopening measures. California closed restaurants, movie theaters and bars. Arizona also shuttered movie theaters and bars, plus gyms and water parks.
On July 13, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs wondered “what in hell is going on” as closures increased. Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox medical expert, criticized the policies as “not consistent,” “punitive” and “draconian.”
However, there are some fractures within the network. A study from April showed that viewers of Hannity were more likely to die of COVID-19 than Carlson’s viewers. Now, the two seem neck-and-neck in misinformation.
Carlson, who in June broke Hannity’s all-time ratings record, recently claimed there was “no evidence” that masks help constrain the pandemic, in contradiction of guidance from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hannity, meanwhile, took the opposite view.
“I went to my grocery store every week. Guess what?” the host recently asked. “They wore masks. Nobody at my grocery store, thank God, got coronavirus.”
“I think they work,” he added.
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plandemic
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/qanon-coronavirus-disinformation_n_5eea6123c5b6a475b84c90c2
no linx great graf
QAnon’s Coronavirus-Fueled Boom Is A Warning Of What's To Come
The far-right conspiracy movement has flourished amid the pandemic, rendering its disinformation campaign stronger than ever ahead of the presidential election.
By Jesselyn Cook, HuffPost US
Hours after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity pondered the news on his radio show. It “may be true,” he mused to his audience of millions, that “coronavirus fearmongering by the deep state will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies, suppress dissent and push mandated medicines.”
Once again, far-right conspiracy theories had broken loose from internet dens and shaped mainstream conservative media coverage. Hannity, a close confidant to President Donald Trump, was parroting a known promoter of QAnon, the online fringe movement that claims a “deep state” cabal of Satanist elites is running an international child sex trafficking ring, among an ever-expanding repertoire of other falsehoods.
The COVID-19 emergency has turbocharged QAnon’s ability to spread tactical disinformation and attract new followers. As the movement seizes on public anxiety surrounding the virus to lure more people into its conspiratorial web, new data compiled by HuffPost reveals shocking spikes in traffic for dozens of the most influential QAnon accounts across social media. Many have more than tripled in size amid the crisis.
With just months until the polls open in November’s presidential election,QAnon has gained a massive new audience for its unhinged propaganda.
“It’s very concerning,” said Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters who studies online extremism. “Whenever a conspiracy theory or falsehood is circulating on social media, you can usually track it to a QAnon figure playing a role in spreading it.”...
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mma 620
:{Hannity: Black Lives Matter is “planning to train armed militia for war on police”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
06/03/20 9:42 PM EDT
520 mma
A new study from British medical journal The Lancet shows that the drug Fox News and President Donald Trump had relentlessly promoted may not be the miracle cure for COVID-19 that the network had made it out to be.
“A study of 96,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients on six continents found that those who received an antimalarial drug promoted by President Trump as a ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus had a significantly higher risk of death compared with those who did not,” The Washington Post reported. “People treated with hydroxychloroquine... were also more likely to develop a type of irregular heart rhythm, or arrhythmia, that can lead to sudden cardiac death, it concluded.”
Fox News is the source of the president's belief that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for the coronavirus. The network’s hosts and contributors promoted the drug literally hundreds of times, running with the flawed conclusions of :{grifters and charlatans:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. Trump responded by publicly promoting the drug and even saying that he was taking it personally, as his public health experts stressed that evidence supporting its use as a treatment was sparse.
Trump even changed federal policy based on Fox’s hydroxychloroquine coverage. Administration officials diverted time and resources from other potential efforts to fight the coronavirus toward the drug because of Fox’s influence. The network continued to tout the drug even as evidence mounted that it was ineffectual.
The drug Fox promoted, according to this Lancet study, actually makes things worse. Instead of listening to public health experts, the network sent the president -- and the federal government -- down a rabbit hole.
Also: Sean Hannity claimed that the worst side effect of hydroxychloroquine is “an allergic rash or upset stomach”; Fox host Jesse Wattersmocked people concerned over FDA warnings on hydroxychloroquine.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/richard-grenells-flynn-unmasking-noninformation-campaign
Right-wing media froth over “Obamagate” and bully press to play along
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 05/15/20 2:15 PM EDT
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump, provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance. Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.
Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way -- or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.
We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy. Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign. He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own. But pro-Trump partisans -- particularly at Fox -- have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public.
This is an intentional plan that corresponds with what the president wants from his director of national intelligence. “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking,” The New York Times reported Thursday. As the president struggles in reelection polling, Trump and his Fox propagandists are using the Flynn story to try to damage the credibility of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 opponent.
Grenell’s noninformation campaign is the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by Trump and his Fox propagandists to turn the Russia investigation inside out, presenting the Trump associates who pleaded or were found guilty under its auspices as victims and those involved in carrying out the probe as criminals.
With vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy in the hands of partisans selected for their loyalty to the president, including the DNI and Justice Department, we should expect more of these releases -- and perhaps more dangerous actions -- in the coming months, as Trump’s supporters try to push the political debate away from the ongoing pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 Americans so far in order to secure his reelection.
The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn is a retired general who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, the transition, and the early days of his White House tenure. At various points during that timeline, Flynn was also assigned by Trump to find the Hillary Clinton emails he had publicly asked Russia to procure; was under investigation by the FBI, which was concerned with whether he was serving as a witting or unwitting agent of the Russian government; was illegally acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, for which he was reportedly involved in discussions of a kidnapping plot; and was seeking Trump’s approval for a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after working as a paid adviser for the group behind the proposal.
On December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the presidential election, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and urged him that Russia not retaliate for those sanctions. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security adviser after reports surfaced that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations, which opened Flynn up to blackmail from the Russian government. He would later repeatedly plead guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI about those calls before renouncing that plea last year.
The position on Flynn among Trumpists like Fox host Sean Hannity is that he is an American hero, that there was no good-faith reason to probe any of his actions during that period, and that anyone involved in such an effort was a participant in the broad-ranging Obama administration conspiracy to take down Trump, which the president terms “OBAMAGATE.”
Their argument features Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in two ways: They argue that the FBI’s interview with Flynn was a nefarious “setup” and suggest that the leak about the conversation from a “senior government official” to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for his 2017 column, which brought the call into public light, was an illegal attempt to take down Flynn and Trump by someone who had improperly “unmasked” his identity from intelligence intercepts.
William Barr’s Justice Department showed last week that the Trump administration is putting the force of the federal government behind Fox’s conspiracy theories when it filed a dubious and virtually unprecedented motion seeking to drop the government’s case against Flynn, citing the FBI’s interview tactics. And on Wednesday, Grenell tried to use his own power as the director of national intelligence to provide grist in support of the other fork of the Flynn defense.
“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Grenell had declassified and provided to the Justice Department what the paper described as “an Obama-era document related to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn” and “a list of Obama administration officials who sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials.” Later that day, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Grenell and Barr asking for the document. Grenell provided it to the senators on Wednesday, and it was immediately leaked to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, a former Fox reporter whose work often promotes Republican talking points. Herridge then published the letter on Twitter. (The document did not turn out to be precisely what the Times had reported. It had been generated on May 4, not during the “Obama era,” and dealt solely with cases involving Flynn, not “Trump associates” more generally.)
In NSA reports derived from the legal surveillance of foreign targets, analysts anonymize (“mask”) the names of U.S. persons to protect their privacy. It is routine for senior officials to ask the NSA to reveal (“unmask”) those identities in cases where they believe that information is necessary to understand the intelligence. The NSA has a standard procedure for doing this, including a review of the justification of the person seeking the unmasking. For context, Trump administration officials sought and received the unmasking of U.S. persons from the NSA more than 10,000 times in 2019 and nearly 17,000 times in 2018.
The document is a list created at Grenell’s request of several dozen “officials who submitted requests” to the NSA between Trump’s election and the end of January 2017 to unmask an identity which turned out to be Flynn, as detailed in an attached memorandum to Grenell from NSA Director Paul Nakasone. It provides the names of the officials, which include then-Vice President Biden, Cabinet secretaries, and intelligence agency leaders, and the date on which their requests were processed. It is the second version of the document -- as Nakasone detailed, the list was originally provided in alphabetical order but revised to be chronological.
That’s it.
Contrary to the insinuations from the right-wing figures, the document provides no evidence that any single unmasking was related to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. In fact, the record suggests none of them were the original unmasking that first discovered Flynn had made the call, as that one was done by the FBI from its own intercept, not the NSA’s. Nor does it show that Flynn was in some way targeted -- by definition, unmasking occurs when senior administration officials don’t know the name of an American referenced in an intelligence report.
Indeed, there is no indication in the document that anyone listed behaved inappropriately -- in fact, it makes clear that the Obama-era unmaskings happened by the book. “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” it states. It also points out that the NSA cannot confirm that any of the persons who requested the unmaskings eventually saw the information.
Grenell’s noninformation plot
Grenell is totally unqualified for his post. While previous occupants of his position ran intelligence agencies, he at most was a consumer of their products during a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. What he brings to the table instead, along with unswerving loyalty to the president, is broad experience in public relations and shaping news cycles, which he honed as a spokesperson for Republican politicians and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, a strategic communications consultant for domestic and foreign clients, a Fox contributor, and a notably unhinged Twitter troll.
Grenell personally requested, sought revisions to, declassified, and provided the document to Congress in precisely this form, showing precisely what he wanted to become public.
If he wanted the document to include more information -- by for example, including the actual documents for which Flynn’s name was unmasked, or summaries thereof -- it would. Without that, despite the right-wing chorus linking Grenell’s document to Flynn’s Kislyak calls, it doesn’t provide evidence that any single unmasking had anything to do with them.In fact the majority of the unmaskings predate the calls and thus could not be related. Indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that Flynn was a participant in the intercepts used in the intelligence reports in which his name was unmasked, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage points out:
If Grenell had wanted the document to include less information -- by, for example, limiting the date range to after Flynn’s December 29 calls with Kislyak, which would reduce the list from 39 names to only eight -- it would.
What he produced is a very long list of names that maximized its impact, with no information whatsoever that any of them were involved in something the least bit inappropriate. That is, presumably, exactly what he wanted to do.
Perhaps Grenell has no evidence of wrongdoing, and few or none of the unmaskings reference the Kislyak calls (which is not implausible, as the FBI derived and distributed its own intercepts of the call with no masking as part of their already in-progress counterintelligence probe of Flynn). In that case, he’s declassified and released this information for a political purpose.
Perhaps he does have that evidence, but isn’t releasing it for now so he can continue to dribble documents out and generate more news stories as the presidential election approaches. In that case, he’s withholding that information for a political purpose.
Fox’s propagandists understand that their role in this noninformation campaign is to fill in the gaps left by the document with feverish, often fact-free speculation. Fox’s Tucker Carlson described Flynn’s unmasking as a “domestic spying operation” that was “hidden under the pretext of national security,” and that the Obama administration officials involved are “amoral creeps” who committed “felonies” and should be “punished.” His prime-time colleague Hannity
by asking, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it? Tonight, we will unravel the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history.” He also attacked Biden for “lying” about the story and claimed on Wednesday that if the officials involved in Flynn’s unmasking don’t face “justice,” “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes.” Despite how little information the Grenell document provides, they are convinced that it vindicates their conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, Fox personalities are attacking the mainstream press for not obsessing over the story, with Hannity arguing that this proves they are “Democratic shills.” On Friday, Trump himself picked up that angle, praising the Fox morning show for “covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE,” while pillorying CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as “Fake News” for failing to do so.
It’s no coincidence that Trump and Fox are trying to bully the mainstream press into giving the story more attention. They are counting on journalists to repeat the failures of the 2016 electionand flood the zone with context-free scandal coverage that dirties up the president’s opponent. That’s the play Trump is calling, and the leaders of the Justice Department and intelligence community are eagerly supporting the effort, and will likely continue dropping noninformation and disinformation until Election Day.
==
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https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/right-wing-media-demand-trump-fire-fbi-director-christopher-wray
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mma 520
- James O'Keefe fell flat again, in his supposed “investigation” of COVID-19 deaths. Sean Hannity was among the few that ran with it.
- Giving up any pretense of subtlety, an OAN host likened Democratic politicians in California to Nazis.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/study-finds-people-who-watched-sean-hannity-were-more-likely-to-die-from-covid-19/
no lnx many
Study finds people who watched Sean Hannity were more likely to die from COVID-19
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon April 22, 2020
A new study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that “greater viewership of ‘Hannity’ relative to ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic.”
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Fox News host Sean Hannity has been heavily criticized for echoing President Donald Trump’s initial attempts to downplay the threat posed by the new coronavirus. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, his colleague at the right-leaning network who has framed the issue in more nationalistic terms, has been credited with convincing the president to take the pandemic seriously.
“Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February,” the researchers wrote in the working paper.
The two hosts diverged greatly on the issue in February. While Hannity expressed optimism that “zero people in the United States have died from the coronavirus,” Carlson warned viewers that the virus could kill 1 million people across the country.
The researchers commissioned a poll of more than 1,000 Fox News viewers, which found that Carlson’s viewers were more likely to change their behavior earlier than Hannity’s viewers.
“We find that Hannity’s viewers on average changed their behavior in response to the coronavirus five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior three days earlier than other Fox News viewers,” the paper said.
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The researchers then compared the death rate in counties that favored either host, finding “approximately 30% more COVID-19 cases” in areas that preferred Hannity than those that watched Carlson.
“Already by mid-March, we see a statistically significant difference — that there are greater case loads in places that favor Hannity over Tucker,” researcher David Yanagizawa-Drott told The Chicago Tribune. “Then weeks later, we see a similar trajectory increase for deaths.”
After Hannity’s “shift in tone,” however, “the diverging trajectories . . . began to revert,” the study said.
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The researchers argued that their findings were consistent with “misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data.”
Polls have similarly found that Fox News viewers as a whole are far more likely to believe the threat of the virus is exaggerated. Another poll showed that Republicans, in general, were less likely to change their behavior in response to the threat than Democrats.
The attempts by certain Fox News opinion hosts to downplay the virus early in the outbreak came in stark contrast to steps the network’s executives and owners took to protect themselves against the virus.
“The selective cherry-picked clips of Sean Hannity’s coverage used in this study are not only reckless and irresponsible, but down right factually wrong,” a spokesperson for Fox News said in a statement. “As this timeline proves, Hannity has covered Covid-19 since the early days of the story. The ‘study’ almost completely ignores his coverage and repeated, specific warnings and concerns from January 27-February 26 including an early interview with Dr. Fauci in January. This is a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Hannity likewise defended his coverage of the virus in an interview with Newsweek earlier this month, arguing that his January interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, showed that his viewers were getting accurate information.
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“Go to my web site, and you’ll see irrefutable evidence that I have taken this seriously way before most in the media did. I warned in January that it was dangerous because it was highly contagious, but some people were asymptomatic, so it would spread quickly,” he said, though he also argued months later that the flu was “much more dangerous” than the new coronavirus and compared the associated death rate to the murder rate in Chicago.
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Hannity’s comments came in response to a letter from 74 journalism professors to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and CEO Lachlan Murdoch calling on the network to stop spreading “misinformation” about the virus.
“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers — and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” the letter said. “. . . Inexcusably, Fox News has violated elementary canons of journalism. In so doing, it has contributed to the spread of a grave pandemic. Urgently, therefore, in the name of both good journalism and public health, we call upon you to help protect the lives of all Americans — including your elderly viewers — by ensuring that the information you deliver is based on scientific facts.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/fox-news-fights-coronavirus-misinformation-lawsuit-first-amendment-protects-false-speec
no lnx
Fox News fights coronavirus misinformation lawsuit: First Amendment protects ‘false’ speech
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon April 16, 2020
Fox News has moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Washington state group accusing the network of “deceptive” coronavirus coverage by arguing that the First Amendment protects “false” and “outrageous” speech.
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The network’s lawyers said in a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit that the “First Amendment does not permit censoring this type of speech based on the theory that it is ‘false’ or ‘outrageous.’ Nor does the law of the State of Washington.”
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The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) filed a lawsuit in King County earlier this month seeking a court order barring the network from “interfering with reasonable and necessary measures to contain the virus by publishing further false and deceptive content.”
The suit accused the network of violating the state’s Consumer Protection Act by “falsely and deceptively disseminating ‘news’ via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a ‘hoax’ and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety.”
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The suit specifically cited Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox Business host Trish Regan for having “acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus.”
Hannity downplayed the threat of the coronavirus and argued it was less dangerous than the flu. Regan was fired shortly after accusing Democrats of pushing a “coronavirus impeachment scam.”
Though there are numerous examples of Fox opinion hosts downplaying the threat posed by the virus, many legal experts have dismissed the idea that the network could be sued for its coverage of the pandemic. One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit has since withdrawn from the case.
“It’s Constitutional Law 101: the First Amendment protects our right to speak openly and freely on matters of public concern,” Fox News Media general counsel Lily Fu Claffee said in a statement. “If WASHLITE doesn’t like what we said, it can criticize us, but it can’t silence us with a lawsuit.”
The network’s 76-page filing, which includes dozens of pages of show transcripts and examples of other media outlets purportedly downplaying the risk of the virus early this year, argues that the hosts “never described the Coronavirus as a ‘hoax’ or a ‘conspiracy,’ but instead used those terms to comment on efforts to exploit the pandemic for political points.”
The network’s lawyers argued that Hannity and Regan simply took part in an “intense public debate” over “how serious of a threat” the virus posed, noting that Hannity, in March, urged the elderly and people with compromised immune systems to take “extra, extra, extra caution.”
The motion also noted that when Regan wrongly argued that the “flu … can be even more deadly” than the coronavirus, she emphasized that she was “not saying that people should not take [the coronavirus] seriously.”
“Under the First Amendment and state law, the truth or falsity of this type of speech must be resolved through free and open debate in the marketplace of ideas — not through burdensome litigation seeking to impose legal penalties on political statements that a jury might deem ‘false’ or ‘outrageous,'” the motion said. “In addition, the Complaint also fails because the statements are constitutionally protected opinions. Again, even accepting the Complaint’s characterization of the speech at issue, the Fox commentators were expressing their view on the scientific question of how dangerous the Coronavirus is and how society should respond to it — including what type of governmental action should be taken.”
The motion went on to cite CNN and New York Times coverage that compared the coronavirus to the flu, arguing that “If this type of allegedly ‘false’ speech can be censored, then free and open debate on matters of public concern is a dead letter.”
The network added that WASHLITE’s bid to get an injunction preventing Fox News from expressing similar opinions in the future is an example of unlawful “extraordinary prior restraint.” The Washington CPA also “does not regulate political commentary … nor is such commentary the type of ‘extreme and outrageous conduct’ covered by the tort of ‘outrage,'” the motion said.
Legal experts largely agreed with the network’s position that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.
Catherine Clark, an attorney for WASHLITE, vowed to respond to the motion and told Variety that the suit “was not about prohibiting free speech, but making sure that news organizations convey accurate information.”
Legal culpability aside, media analysts have widely criticized Fox News for putting their viewers at risk by downplaying the threat posed by the virus, which has now killed 26,000 people in the United States.
“Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal,” wrote New York Times columnist Ben Smith.
A letter signed by more than 70 journalism professors around the country criticized Fox News for spreading “misinformation” about the virus.
“Viewers of Fox News, including the president of the United States, have been regularly subjected to misinformation relayed by the network — false statements downplaying the prevalence of COVID-19 and its harms; misleading recommendations of activities that people should undertake to protect themselves and others, including casual recommendations of untested drugs; false assessments of the value of measures urged upon the public by their elected political leadership and public health authorities,” the letter said, pointing to a recent poll that found that 79% of Fox News viewers believed the media had overstated the danger posed by the virus.
The network’s competitors have seized on the criticism.
“There are surveys on this, showing a majority of people who get information from Fox still think the virus threat is overblown,” MSNBC host Ari Melber said last week:
They’re more likely to downplay it even compared to other Republicans. If you don’t get your information from Fox News or online conspiracy theories, you’re less likely to think it’s overblown because it’s not overblown. For Fox viewers, it’s especially perilous. The median age there is 67. That mostly older audience, especially vulnerable if they contract this virus. And as we just showed you, they’ve been told to basically downplay it.
Read the full Fox News motion below:
Fox News 2020-04-14 Motion … by Igor Derysh on Scribd
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/these-pharmaceutical-companies-are-funding-spread-covid-misinformation-fox
04/10/20 4:07 PM EDT
Many pharmaceutical companies that are conducting ongoing research into COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines are among the top sponsors of the Fox News Channel,a cesspool of medical misinformation, racist fearmongering, and reckless speculation that put vulnerable populations in harm’s way. These companies, many of which are spending millions to research therapies and donate specialized resources that might alleviate the toll of the virus, are undermining their own work by advertising on Fox News, whose coverage of the pandemic has been described as a “genuine public health threat.”
Here’s a list of these pharmaceutical companies. You can let them know they must stop sponsoring the spread of deadly misinformation during a global pandemic.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
GlaxoSmithKline is a U.K.-based global pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturer and a leading Fox News advertiser. It has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into researching COVID-19 therapeutics and has partnered with the British government and AstraZeneca to set up a testing facility at the University of Cambridge.
The company has run over 3,000 ads on Fox News since January 2019 and recently advertised on shows that have misinformed viewers about COVID-19, including Fox & Friends and The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton.
Pfizer Inc.
Pfizer is an American biopharmaceutical company and a top Fox News advertiser. The company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to scale up its manufacturing capacity to fight COVID-19 and is running multiple studies into potential therapeutics.
Pfizer has run over 2,600 ads on Fox News since January 2019.
Novartis
Novartis is a Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer and a Fox News advertiser. The company makes hydroxychloroquine and has promised to donate its entire inventory “not already allocated to existing orders and customers” to combat COVID-19. It also recently established the COVID-19 Response Fund, pledging “$20 million in grants to support public health initiatives.”
The company has run nearly 1,900 ads on Fox News since January 2019. In 2020, it has advertised on shows hosted by COVID misinformers such as Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham.
Sanofi
Sanofi is a multinational pharmaceutical company, a manufacturer of hydroxychloroquine, and a top advertiser on COVID misinformer Sean Hannity’s prime-time show.
In collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Sanofi is currently testing a prescription medication designed to treat rheumatoid arthritis among COVID patients in New York with the hope that the drug can alleviate fevers and aid patients with oxygen intake.
Since January 2019, Sanofi-owned brands have advertised on Fox News over 1,700 times. Besides being a top advertiser on Hannity, Sanofi has paid for programming on shows that have advocated for the premature end to social distancing guidelines, includingThe Ingraham Angleand Fox & Friends. Previously, Sanofi dropped Bill O’Reilly’s now-defunct prime-time show when he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. It remains to be seen if the company will do the same when even more is at stake.
Vanda Pharmaceuticals
Vanda Pharmaceuticals is a therapeutics manufacturer based in Washington, D.C. It is currently running a clinical study of potential COVID treatments. The company has run 269 advertisements on Fox News since January 2019, including following Sean Hannity’s interview with President Donald Trump in which Trump touted “potential cures” for coronavirus that might benefit Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Bayer
Bayer is a multinational pharmaceutical manufacturer that also manufactures chloroquine phosphate, and it is a top advertiser on Hannity and Fox News overall. The company has made multiple pledges to donate resources to fight COVID-19 in the U.S. and Spain. It is also paying for the spread of medical misinformation by advertising on Fox News: the company has run over 3,900 ads since January 2019, including 493 since the beginning of 2020. Brands owned by Bayer that run advertisements on the network include Bayer Aspirin, Aleve, Claritin, Dr. Scholl’s and Alka-Seltzer, among many others.
Gilead Sciences
Gilead Sciences is a California-based pharmaceutical research and development company that has a forthcoming study of its drug Remdesivir and whether it has therapeutic properties to treat COVID-19. It has run 269 advertisements on Fox since January 2019. This year, the company advertised on shows hosted by coronavirus misinformers, including Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro.
AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca is a multinational biopharmaceutical company that frequently advertises on Fox News.The company is currently researching potential treatments for coronavirus using antibody therapeutics. It has also publicly committed to donating 9 million face masks to health care workers across the world. The company is also a major sponsor of programs spreading COVID-19 misinformation; since January 2019 it has run over 700 advertisements on Fox News, including on Fox & Friends, and The Five.
Takeda
Takeda is a global pharmaceutical company and a Fox News advertiser that recently announced it is partnering with plasma companies to develop an antibody therapeutic to treat complications associated with COVID-19.It has advertised on Fox 563 times since January 2019and recently ran ads on The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, a show that has promoted an approach to COVID-19 that runs afoul of guidance from public health experts.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-how-fox-news-is-badly-misinterpreting-the-coronavirus-science
no lnx
Here’s how Fox News is badly misinterpreting the coronavirus science
Written by Alex Henderson April 10, 2020
While MSNBC and CNN have offered more than their share of high-quality, informative reporting during the coronavirus pandemic, one cannot say the same about Fox News — which seriously downplayed the pandemic’s severity back in January and February. Fox News’ tone has shifted considerably since then, and its hosts are no longer claiming that the pandemic doesn’t pose a major threat to the United States. But as Media Matters’ Eric Kleefeld explains in an article published this week, some Fox News hosts are calling for a premature end to social distancing — despite evidence that it is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and lowering the number of deaths.
“Fox News is continuing its effort to declare victory in the country’s struggle to get through the coronavirus pandemic, pointing to continued downward revisions in the projected death count to argue that the regular economy should be reopened,” Kleefeld writes. “In fact, those downward revisions are happening precisely because of the social distancing measures that Fox commentators want to start peeling back.”
Members of Trump’s coronavirus task force, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, have warned that based on some models, coronavirus could eventually kill 100,000-240,000 people in the United States. But on Wednesday, Kleefeld notes, CNN reported a more optimistic model of around 60,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. over the next four months.
The more optimistic projections, Kleefeld stresses, indicate that social distancing is working — and underscore a need for the U.S. to double down on social distancing, not let up on it. But some Fox News hosts, according to Kleefeld, want to let up on it.
One of the Fox pundits who is badly misinterpreting the 60,000 projection, Kleefeld reports, is Sean Hannity — who told his viewers, “No state has experienced a surge anywhere near what was told and expected. … Now, while we continue to fight COVID-19, this country must also harness its ingenuity, its brilliance, the free market system — and figure a way to get Americans safely back to work as soon as possible,where they want to be. You can’t allow America’s businesses to wither on the vine and die.”
Kleefeld points out that other Fox News pundits, including Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, have been insisting that the 100,000-240,000 projection was wrong from the beginning. But the more optimistic 60,000 projection, according to Kleefeld, doesn’t show that the 100,000-240,000 projection was inherently flawed — it shows that social distancing is a success and is helping the U.S. to avoid the deadlier scenario.
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03/27/20 9:20 AM EDT
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/yale-psychiatrist-explains-why-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-donald-trumps-irrational-cult-is-a-deadly-combination/
wacko
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no lnx twt
It's Time to Stop Televising Trump's Briefings]
Fox News Is Still Peddling Coronavirus Misinformation to Its Extremely At-Risk Viewers
The network's audience skews older. When will it stop doubling down on the propaganda that could put viewers in mortal danger?
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BY JACK HOLMES
MAR 13, 2020
The people most at risk in the novel coronavirus pandemic are the elderly and those with immunodeficiency. That's why we all have a duty to practice social distancing, even if we are younger and unlikely to bear the brunt of all this. We owe it to people in gravest danger. In America, many of those at-risk older folks watch a lot of Fox News. In some cases, it's their main or only source of information. But even over the last day or so, the network has scarcely changed the tune on its opinion shows, even as Fox employees are now starting to work from home.
The morning and primetime shows are still downplaying the threat of the virus, occasionally suggesting it's some sort of plot orchestrated against the president. (By the Deep State? In coordination with, uh, 60 million Italians? And the first lady of Canada?) The network is offering people misinformation or even outright conspiracies, often by booking guests who have zero expertise in any field beyond kissing Donald Trump's ass. In short, the Fox News Channel is an enterprise that seems determined to place its core customer base in mortal danger. Beyond the sociopathy, this seems bad for business.
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It's Not 'Politicizing the Crisis,' It's Your Duty]
We had one example last night on the television program hosted by Sean Hannity, just the man you want serving up fact-like objects regarding a global pandemic. The superstar peddler of resentment and paranoia hosted a succession of people who know nothing about pandemic disease to yell at each other about who's peddling "Chinese propaganda." Then he had on Tom Cotton, United States Senator from Arkansas, and one of the most brazenly irresponsible people in elected office today.
.@SenTomCotton on the Bidens' coziness w/ China: "In light of how China's unleashed this plague on the entire world ... it's even more urgent that we examine Joe Biden's decade long record of being wrong on China" and Hunter's biz dealings. pic.twitter.com/PZZVZ4GYaJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 13, 2020
They are conspiracizing about Hunter Biden after weeks of completely failing their viewers on the actual defining issue of the day. Not only that, Cotton was determined to hit every insane note. He had a fair-enough critique of Joe Biden's comments on China—they were, indeed, stupid—but then it was on to vague insinuation of Biden corruption; unproven claims about the effectiveness of Trump's travel ban on China; framing the pandemic, without evidence, as an attack on America by "the Chinese Communist Party." Using smoke and mirrors that fans of The Emails (2016) will recognize, Cotton attempted to tie Hunter Biden's overseas business connections to coronavirus.
Then Hannity jumped in with some (nonsense) Ukraine talk before a brief discussion of how hard he, Sean Hannity, has worked for his money.
Then Cotton was back on, suggesting there are "fishy circumstances" and calling for an investigation into the Bidens. Again, this is amid a global pandemic Fox has downplayed for weeks. (Cotton, for his part, has been making a lot of noise about it.) Then Cotton reiterated the notion, citing zero evidence, that this is some sort of bioweapon attack orchestrated by China on the whole world. If there is an elected official hornier for international conflict than Tom Cotton, his first name is Lindsey.
Cotton: China is "not going to get away with infecting the world with this Chinese Coronavirus” pic.twitter.com/DbFN48h5H9
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 13, 2020
Yes, the Chinese government lied and distorted the issue for months and punished whistleblowers in totalitarian fashion. We still had months to prepare and did nothing. The President of the United States himself distorted and downplayed the threat constantly. He said people were going to work while sick, no big deal. He said it would go away miraculously. He said we were on the brink of having a vaccine available. All of this was complete bullshit, excavated from his ass and served up to the public at a juncture when we actually could have done something.
And just last night, we learned via NPR this public posture completely reflected what was going on behind the scenes. Trump rejected pleas from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that coronavirus represented a serious threat that required action in January. Up until this week, the president has resisted widespread testing—one of the keys to South Korea's success in mitigating the problem—for a simple reason: "The president had made clear—the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall."
Throughout all this, the president and his allies have believed they can will this thing away like every other scandal that has struck his presidency. If they just keep doubling down on unreality, eventually enough people will believe it that it will be true, just like all their other scams. Except the virus is impervious to bullshit. Cotton's deployment of the term "Chinese coronavirus" is a signal they are going to try to racism their way out of this now, but it's not going to work when Fox News viewers start contracting the virus in large numbers. Which, as it stands, is going to happen. Earlier this week, a congressional doctor estimated 75 to 150 million Americans will get this thing. But this is what Fox served up to viewers this morning.
On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are "overreacting" to coronavirus, the national response is "their next attempt to get Trump," and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020
What the fuck, man? Why are you hosting Trump's pastor-adjacent amigo—who has intricate ties to former Trump fixer Michael Cohen—to talk about a public-health threat? What value does Jerry Falwell offer if you actually want to inform your viewers, who again are often in the most at-risk demographic group, about the situation with COVID-19? (Later, he called for various counties to secede from Virginia. To reiterate: what the fuck?) Falwell even took Cotton's bioweapon conspiracy-mongering to a new level, suggesting this was the result of North Korea's (??) work in cahoots with China. Also, he said it's an impeachment hoax. Again: 60 million Italians are quarantined in their homes, singing together out their windows to feel they're not alone for days on end, as part of a plan to remove the American president from office?
This is just more doubling down, even as these people surely know that some of the people watching are going to die from this thing. That is just a fact. Fox News viewers who've been told for weeks that this thing is not a big deal, that the media is blowing it out of proportion to hurt the president, that it's some bioweapon-slash-hoax, are going to die. Eventually, everyone will agree that this was not some Liberal Fake News Anti-Trump Hoax. Eventually, it will surely be clear, even to Fox News viewers, that Fox News has been lying about it in conjunction with the president. Will this change how people evaluate what constitutes a good source of information? Don't hold your breath.
JACK HOLMES Politics Editor
Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.
see covid fox 5
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trump-repeats-lie-sean-hannity-about-obama-and-h1n1-flu
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/fox-news-is-a-fascist-network-propping-up-an-incompetent-buffoon-of-a-leader-coronavirus-proved-it/
no lnx
Fox News is a fascist network propping up an incompetent buffoon of a leader. Coronavirus proved it
Written by Hunter / Daily Kos March 17, 2020
Only hours after Donald Trump on Friday gave a press conference begrudgingly admitting the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic he had been insisting was “under control” for nearly a month, Fox News’ most toxic hosts revised their own previously denial-heavy rhetoric to match. Once again, it demonstrates the status of the network as “state news” operation devoted near-exclusively to the needs of conservative propaganda.
If the line from Dear Leader is that alarm over the virus is a “hoax” intended to damage him, that is what Sean Hannity will also say—even knowing that his words will kill some of the network’s own viewers. If the line from Dear Leader is that alarm over the virus is now warranted, Sean Hannity is himself freed to declare that alarm is warranted. But this, too, will be used primarily as a launching point for further praise of the self-promoting, incompetent Dear Leader.
Here is Sean Hannity on Friday, the evening after Trump shifted tone from sneering at administration critics to declaring a national emergency, while still sneering at administration critics. “Tonight, we are witnessing what will be a massive paradigm shift in the future of disease control and prevention. A bold, new precedent is being set, the world will once again benefit greatly from America’s leadership. It will give us reason to be proud as a country. The federal government, state governments, private businesses, top hospitals all coming together, under the president’s leadership, to stem the tide of the coronavirus.”
Note the use of the word “bold,” one of the otherwise near-illiterate president’s favorite adjectives. It is Dear Leader’s “leadership” that has allowed the United States to finally do what it has done in every similar crisis; declaring a national emergency is now not a longstanding designation allowing our or any government to take specific, defined steps to combat a new threat but a “bold new precedent” from Dear Leader, for the “benefit” of the world.
SeanHannity spent weeks lying about the virus, downplaying its dangerousness and its spread. Now that the game is up and members of his audience will, with near-certainty, be dying in large part due to Dear Leader’s inaction and Sean Hannity’s teleprompter, Sean Hannity will now spend weeks praising Dear Leader’s “boldness” with a North Korean polish and a distinctly Fox News sneer. The Washington Post notes that Hannity was matched in this new revision of state propaganda by Laura Ingraham, among others. Go only so far as Dear Leader himself is willing to; follow Dear Leader as Dear Leader meanders his mental way through each new moment of revelation. No further.
Devil-among-us Jerry Falwell Jr., a frequent Fox guest, was on the network Friday morning telling the Fox & Friends couch that his Liberty University would not be shuttering during the crisis, displaying the trademark Fox sneer while downplaying virus scares as “hype,” and saying “maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.” After Trump’s Friday declaration, Falwell changed his own tune to acknowledge the severity of the crisis—sort of. In practice, he defended his original decision but said that the Virginia governor’s ban on gatherings of 100 or more people “left us no practical choice.”
This week, after a “somber” Trump once again bowed to realities his advisers had never before been able to drill into his skull, Fox News hosts matched his new rhetoric as well. Useful network idiot Jesse Watters changed his tune over the weekend. Not because of the presidential about-face, certainly not. It was “mom.”
“She is suspicious that I might have coronavirus. I wore the gloves all afternoon in the house. That’s what it is. I didn’t take the social distancing that seriously Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, I went out to dinner here in the city. And I woke up this morning I realized that was not the right move.”
Do we really believe that Watters had not noticed that the world outside the Fox News studio was incongruent with the reports from inside until a morning revelation? Or was Monday morning the first moment in which it was safe to note it without penalty?
I am tired of this. I am very, very tired of the pretense that anything this scabby sore of a network does revolves around anything but propping up the most narrow and most radical of agendas; demonization of Dear Leader’s enemies and maudlin praise for Dear Leader’s boldness. It is a fascist network using the bog-standard rhetorical tools of fascism to prop up a fascist, incompetent buffoon of a leader. They will attack anyone on Dear Leader’s behalf. They will let their audience die—they will provide the crematory, if needed—if Dear Leader needs to just one more evening of adulation to get him through the next day without full-on emotional collapse.
Sean Hannity goads his viewers into support for ignoring even a pandemic until the moment it can no longer be ignored. He will goad his viewers again, this time into believing it was Dear Leader who limited the deaths to whatever horrific number they may rise to. Very, very rich men who want just a bit more money than they already have will watch him do it, and allow him to do it, and will pay him to do it.
They will, if anything, order that more flags be added to the network graphics.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-lavishes-praise-sen-ron-johnson-opening-investigation-joe-biden
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Fox News, led by Sean Hannity, has been begging Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate or arrest a list of government officials
WRITTEN BY COURTNEY HAGLE
PUBLISHED 02/19/20 10:54 AM EST
President Donald Trump triggered turmoil in the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week after he tweeted public complaints about the sentencing recommendations for his longtime associate Roger Stone, after which Attorney General Bill Barr appeared to step in and interfere in the case. The incident rattled the legal community as fears escalated that an emboldened Trump -- with Barr’s help -- is politicizing the Justice Department for personal gain, prompting more than 2,000 former Department of Justice officials to sign a letter calling for Barr’s resignation and the Federal Judges Association to call an unprecedented emergency meeting.
Additional reporting revealed that Stone’s case was not the first time Barr’s Justice Department has intervened in legal matters close to Trump; NBC News reported on February 11 that Barr also intervened in the criminal investigations into former acting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. On February 14, the Justice Department announced that McCabe would not be charged with lying to investigators, which Stone’s right-wing media defenders angrily insisted was an example of DOJ hypocrisy and further evidence of the “deep state” conspiracy theory against Trump.
Fox News host Sean Hannity, along with a slew of his network cohorts, has spent years advancing that conspiracy theory while relentlessly calling on Barr and the Justice Department to investigate and arrest Trump’s political opponents. Some of these Fox News figures calling for new investigations were implicated in Trump’s Ukraine scandal, such as contributor John Solomon and the GOP legal duo Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. Others include Fox regulars Gregg Jarrett, Sara Carter, Dan Bongino, and Tom Fitton. The details among these calls vary, but they all carry the same theme: “Investigate the investigators,” or anyone else who has dared look into Trump’s misconduct over the last several years.
At the core of Hannity’s grievance is an overwhelming obsession with the idea that a bureaucratic “deep state” has been seeking to undermine Trump’s presidency since before the 2016 election. Every attempt to hold Trump accountable since then -- the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal that led to impeachment, and any other inconvenient fact about Trump that surfaces -- has supposedly been evidence of the “deep state” trying to take down the president.
Given Trump’s long history of taking cues from Fox News and widespread concerns about the attorney general’s recent politicization of the Justice Department, it's worth documenting the list of people whom Fox News has been relentlessly calling on Barr to investigate, arrest, or convict as part of this “deep state” conspiracy theory:
- Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
- Former FBI Director James Comey
- Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
- Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates
- Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
- Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr
- Former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr
- Former FBI agent Peter Strzok
- Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page
- Former FBI lawyer James Baker
- Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
- Former national security adviser Susan Rice
- Former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power
- Former CIA Director John Brennan
- Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch
- Former President Barack Obama
And here is more on the supposed reasons for investigating them, from Hannity himself.
Fox News on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and officials in the “deep state”
Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has long served as a boogeyman for right-wing circles to attack, but Trump’s 2016 election brought a newfound desire to “lock her up,” as evidenced in Trump supporters’ infamous rally chant. Specifically, Hannity now wants her arrested for the “phony dossier that was full of Russian lies” -- commonly known as the Steele dossier -- that her 2016 campaign obtained from opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Hannity claims this was the basis of the FISA warrant to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. (It wasn’t.) Nellie Ohr worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS; many on the right point to the fact that her husband, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, is a high-ranking DOJ official as further evidence of the “deep state,” and Hannity has called for retaliatory investigations against both.
Fox News’ grievances against Clinton also include complaints that the Uranium One and email server scandals -- flimsy right-wing conspiracy theories that have already been investigated and resulted in Clinton’s exoneration -- were looked into by sham investigations led by former FBI Director James Comey. Hannity has called for Barr to reopen these investigations, often claiming that it’s hypocritical that Clinton hasn’t been treated as badly as he feels Trump has.
Hannity’s obsession with the “deep state” has led to his fixation on seeing punishment for the FBI investigators and anyone involved in Mueller’s investigation or in the events leading up to it. Hannity’s show spent months hyping up the DOJ’s internal inspector general report that looked into the investigators of the Mueller probe, compiled by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in hopes that he would punish the people they’re hoping for. While the IG report did find some evidence of wrongdoing in the Mueller investigation, the conclusions were nowhere near the dramatic, nefarious conspiracy theory Hannity spent months weaving for his viewers. Refusing to falter, Hannity then turned his hopes to Barr, in his new role as attorney general, and federal prosecutor John Durham, who is currently leading a criminal inquiry into the origins of the Mueller investigation.
Hannity’s accusations are muddled and flimsy, but the core idea is that former and current officials associated with the FBI colluded with Clinton’s campaign to help her win, and when that didn’t succeed, they launched a sham investigation (the Mueller investigation) into Trump to undermine his presidency. In Hannity’s view, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein knowingly lied to the FISA court by using Clinton’s “phony dossier that was full of Russian lies” to illegally target Carter Page without informing the court that it was unverified and came from Clinton.
Fox figures have also accused Comey of leaking classified information, which has since been disproven. Hannity also claims Comey, McCabe, Bruce Ohr, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page used their positions to “persecute those they disagreed with politically, all trying to get Hillary Clinton elected.” Hannity also claims McCabe lied to the inspector general and committed perjury.
According to Fox News personalities, former FBI lawyer James Baker, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former national security adviser Susan Rice, former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and possibly former President Barack Obama himself also supposedly played a role in illegally leaking information toward the end of Obama’s presidency.
Here is just a small sample of the times Fox News figures have called for Barr to investigate individuals associated with the FBI, the Clintons, and the Obama administration:
- Last May, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski predicted on Lou Dobbs Tonight that “in March or April of next year, James Comey, Andy McCabe, Strzok and Page will be on trial for the crimes they committed.”
- On a December 2017 edition of Fox News @ Night, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton suggested that the FBI had been “compromised” and “turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration.”
- A few months later, in February 2018, Fitton accused Obama of “presidential involvement in these sensitive criminal investigations,” referring to the investigation into Clinton’s emails and Mueller’s Russia investigation. Fitton added that he’s “always wondered why President Obama has skated really free from any serious inquiries about his involvement in the Russia investigations.”
- After the release of the Mueller report in March 2019, Hannity said that his “sources” were telling him “it’s all about to come cascading down” on those he claimed had “rigged the investigation into Hillary’s emails scandal” when there was “clear, compelling, incontrovertible evidence.” Hannity went on to call for the Trump administration to “fully expose every single one of these deep state actors,” saying, “James Comey, let’s start with him. Let’s start with Sally Yates. They need to be investigated. McCabe needs to be investigated.” He added, “Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, John Brennan, Clapper, Lynch -- … they all must now be put under oath [and] investigated."
- On February 7, 2019, Hannity asked, “When is anybody going to be held accountable” for the Mueller investigation. His guest Gregg Jarrett predicted on Hannity that Barr would open investigations into Clinton and others after being sworn in as attorney general.
- One week later, a *Hannity* panel consisting of Jarrett, Carter, and guest David Schoen argued that at least a “dozen” individuals essentially “sought a coup d'etat to overthrow the President of the United States.” The panel named McCabe, Rosenstein, Brennan, Clapper, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, and others.
- In March 2019, Hannity called out the supposed “rigged investigation into Hillary'' by Comey, Baker, and others. He asked “how is it possible with all that evidence” that Mueller isn’t investigating FBI officials, Obama officials, and the Clintons. DiGenova responded that “it is quite obvious that there were crimes committed by people associated with the Clinton campaign” and others that “have been ignored.”
- August 2019, Hannity told Republican members of Congress that a “little birdie” told him that “apparently the FBI … didn’t treat [Clinton’s] campaign the way they treated Donald Trump.” Hannity also attacked the Steele dossier, Comey, and FBI officials.
- After it was reported that the DOJ would not be charging McCabe, Hannity said that if there aren’t successful investigations against the senior officials involved in investigating Russian interference, “we’re not going to have a constitutional republic anymore.” He added, “There is a five-alarm fire going on, … and it affects every single player that we have now talked about, and all of the crimes we’ve exposed, and all of the corruption we’ve exposed, and all the abuse of power we’ve exposed.”
- After Barr announced counter-investigations into the Mueller investigation in April 2019, Hannity declared that “to date, we have been right about everything that has transpired surrounding the deep state’s abuse of power” and warned that “if we don’t investigate investigators, lock up the bad actors, this country will be over as we know it.” Joe diGenova called Comey a “dirty cop” and said that Barr will “conclude” that “it all started in the White House. Barack Obama knew about this from day one.” Victoria Toensing predicted Obama, Biden, Yates, Rice, and Comey may be implicated.
- fox News has been calling on Bill Barr to carry out retaliatory investigations
For more than a year, various Fox News personalities have assured viewers that there is one man who is capable of taking down everyone who they feel has wronged Trump: Bill Barr.
- In a segment from December 2018 attacking the Clintons, Strzok, Page, and Obama, Toensing assured Dan Bongino, who was a guest host on Hannity, that “if we get Bill Barr in as the attorney general,” their concerns “will be addressed.”
- during Barr’s confirmation hearing in February 2019, Hannity presented a “road map of corruption” of all the crimes he wanted Barr to investigate regarding the Mueller report, saying that there is “no shortage of corrupt Trump-haters to investigate.”
- In April 2019, Barr announced counter-investigations into the Mueller report. Fox contributor Sara Carter predicted that an “avalanche” of information would be revealed by Barr’s investigations, and there are “a number of indictments that are on the way.” She claimed that the investigations will “lead all the way back to the White House. … And I’m talking about the Obama administration."
- in September, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs asked diGenova and Toensing, “How much are we going to be thanking Bill Barr ourselves?” DiGenova assured Dobbs that “Barr is a strong-willed individual” who “will not be afraid to bring cases that need to be brought.” DiGenova added that “the one thing he is going to do, I assure you,” is “to lower the hammer in a public way that’s going to be quite revealing to the American people.”
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, Donald Trump will give his first nationally televised interview with a broadcast network in seven months when he appears on Fox Broadcasting Co. before the Super Bowl. He won't face any tough questions about his abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, or anything else for that matter, because he will be interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity, a loyal sycophant with deep ties to his administration.
Here's a brief rundown of Hannity's corruption in recent years:
- 2016: Amid a presidential campaign that saw Hannity actively using his show to boost Trump’s candidacy and promote unhinged conspiracy theories about his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Hannity endorsed Trump in a promotional video for his campaign, leading to a stern statement from Fox.
- 2017: Hannity triggered an advertiser exodus and internal dismay when he tried to defend Trump against reports linking his campaign to Russian interference in the 2016 election by championing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.
- 2018: Profiles in The Washington Post and New York magazine detailed the scope of Hannity’s White House influence and regular conversations with Trump. He was revealed as a secret client of Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, a fact the Fox host had not disclosed in his commentary on Cohen’s case. And he appeared on stage and spoke at a Trump political rally on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections.
- 2019: Hannity was a central figure in the Ukraine disinformation plot that triggered Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives.
- 2020: Documents uncovered by BuzzFeed News showed that Hannity had served as a backchannel between Trump and his associates under investigation during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Fox’s message is clear: When the stakes are highest and the spotlight is brightest, the network produces right-wing propaganda, not journalism.
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HANNITY INVOLVED W RUDY ET AL? IF DJT GOES DOWN SO DOES HE/ FOX?
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no lnx
Hannity’s latest meltdown shows the ‘cult of Trump’ now thinks speaking truth amounts to ‘hatred’: op-ed
Written by Raw Story January 29, 2020
In a piece published at the Washington Post this Wednesday, Greg Sargent writes that the “Cult of Trump” now deems any Republican who “dares to acknowledge the relevance of facts outside the disinformation bubble that President Trump and his propagandists have constructed in his defense” can only be motivated by “Trump hatred.” Case in point: Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Sargent cites Hannity’s “spectacular meltdown” over the fact that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has expressed openness to hearing testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton.
Andrew Lawrence
@ndrew_lawrence
Hey, do you want to watch Sean Hannity losing his goddam mind on live TV during the most watched hour in cable news?
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“Hannity’s performance illustrates how preposterously weak Trump’s defenses have become, and how heavily they depend on insulating Trump’s extraordinary corruption, and the lies justifying it, from contrary facts and legitimate outside scrutiny,” Sargent writes.
According to Sargent, Hannity’s panicking is the result of news that there are potentially four GOP senators who will vote to allow more witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial — a development in which Mitch McConnell reportedly doesn’t have the votes to stop.
“What this really means is that, if GOP senators vote against hearing new information, they’ll be carrying Trump’s coverup through to completion,” Sargent writes. “This is what Hannity is actually raging at Romney for failing to facilitate.”
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-trump-political-operative-and-fox-news-doesnt-care
you’d be forgiven if, amid the lead-up to President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate and the ongoing Democratic presidential primary, you missed BuzzFeed News’ story last week detailing how Fox News host Sean Hannity served “as a central point of contact” between the president and his associates under investigation during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But the report -- and Fox News’ lack of interest in addressing it -- marks new terrain for Hannity’s unpaid position in the Trump White House and his network’s effective merger with the administration.
Hannity has spent the last few years finding new and original ways to set afire the journalism ethics rules enforced elsewhere, from endorsing the then-Republican nominee in a campaign ad to failing to disclose that he shared a lawyer with the president to speaking at one of Trump’s rallies. Each of these instances underscored Hannity’s unconscionable role as a political operative whose first loyalty is to Trump, someone who simultaneously hosts a propaganda show enforcing the president’s positions while shaping Trump’s views as a powerful adviser.
The details BuzzFeed News revealed after combing through summaries of Mueller team interviews with key witnesses show that the Fox host hasn’t just been advising the president. Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen each revealed to the special counsel’s office that Hannity had also counseled them on how to respond to probes from Mueller and the House of Representatives, respectively, even as he reported on their cases on his Fox show.
BuzzFeed News quotes from a particularly instructive summary of an October 2018 interview, in which Manafort describes Hannity as acting as a “back channel” to the president between the time FBI raided Manafort’s residence in July 2017 and when he was indicted in October 2017. “Manafort knew Hannity was speaking to Trump around then because Hannity would tell Manafort to hang in there, that he had been talking to Trump, that Trump had his back, and things like that,” the summary states. “Manafort understood his conversations with Hannity to be a message from Trump.”
The summary provides new context for text messages Hannity sent Manafort during that period urging the former Trump campaign chair to “stay strong,” suggesting that Manafort at least believed the remarks to be from the president to influence him not to cooperate with the Mueller probe. And it shows Hannity privately and egregiously engaged with the subjects of his putative reporting.
These revelations would be completely unacceptable at any other network. But the most important line of BuzzFeed News’ story is the one that indicates that for Hannity’s network, they aren’t even worth publicly addressing: “Fox News declined to answer a series of questions BuzzFeed News sent the network about Hannity’s appearance in the documents.”
This passivity marks a change for Fox, which has previously responded to new revelations about its star host’s second life as an unpaid Trump aide first by pledging tough action and later by at least pretending to care with empty statements.Hannity’s 2016 appearance in the Trump ad led to a swift statement from a Fox spokesperson promising that it would not happen again. After news broke that Cohen had at one point represented Hannity -- a fact the Fox host never mentioned on-air while discussing Cohen’s own legal troubles -- Fox issued a statement saying that the host had been “spoken to.” And Hannity’s appearance on stage at the November 2018 Trump rally led to Fox statement that the network did not “condone” the appearance and that it “has been addressed.”
These were all woefully insufficient responses to what would likely have been, at any other news outlet, firing offenses.But they at least indicated that Fox felt it had to say something about its employee’s casual disregard for basic precepts of journalistic integrity. That no longer appears to be the case.
It’s possible that Fox executives have simply given up trying to deny the reality that Hannity’s top priority is the president, not their network or their audience. But this shift in public relations strategy may also speak to a shift in the power dynamic between Fox’s “news” and “opinion” side. In the past, Hannity’s ethical misdeeds would lead to an angry backlash from his “news”-side colleagues, sometimes spilling out into public view in the form of enraged anonymous comments to other outlets.
But over the past year, Fox’s “news” side has been completely routed in this internal battle. Longtime lead anchor Shepard Smith, who was willing to push back against the disinformation rampant elsewhere on the network and even feud with his prime-time colleagues, left the channel in October. His replacement, Bill Hemmer, is more comfortable hewing to the pro-Trump line and has used the media rollout for his new gig carefully avoiding ruffling the feathers of either Fox’s “opinion” hosts or the White House. Hemmer’s own replacement, Ed Henry, has spent the last few years cozily ensconced on Fox & Friends’ curvy couch as a co-host of its weekend edition. With Smith gone, voices of criticism within Fox seem to have been muted.
With the “news” side either replaced by shills or cowed by the changing of the guard, Fox executives no longer face internal pressure to rein in the likes of Hannity. That may leave them with no reason to restrain their opinion hosts other than their own regard for journalistic ethics. And as the ongoing silence on the Manafort connection shows, that doesn’t amount to much.
cf
11/06/18 10:25 AM EST
04/16/18 3:55 PM EDT
10/11/19 4:59 PM EDT
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sean Hannity Delivers What Could Be Most Self-Unaware Moment Of 2020 So Far
The Fox News host self-owned with a radio show rant about lying “paying pretty well.”
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By Lee Moran
Fox News’ Sean Hannity delivered a self-unaware moment on Friday when he ranted on his radio show about lying “paying pretty well.”
The “Hannity” host ? in one of his regular diatribes against critics of Donald Trump ? accused the president’s high-profile detractors of “just advancing a political agenda” with their appearances on rival cable news networks.
Said Hannity:
You know, the laundry list of people that now are experts, Comey[3 YR OLD LEAK INVEST RE-OPENED?!] , Brennan, McCabe, Clapper, all these people, and now they’re getting paid gigs on the same networks that got it wrong. It’s unbelievable. Great gig, I guess, if you can get it. Lying, propagandizing, I guess, pays for people. It pays pretty well. So what’s that? These are con artists now, you know they’re just liars, they’re just advancing a political agenda.
Hannity, who reportedly talks with Trump on the phone multiple times every day, forgot to mention his own frequent regurgitation of the president’s (often baseless) talking points on his widely watched primetime show.
He joined Trump onstage at a rally ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and attacked members of the media covering the event as “fake news.” Last year, he promised to join Trump on the 2020 campaign trail, telling the president’s supporters they would “be sick of seeing me.” And only last week, Hannity threatened Republican senators if they allowed witnesses to be called during Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.
Check out the audio, courtesy of Media Matters, here:
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/sean-hannity-and-fox-news-are-up-to-their-hair-plugs-in-the-lev-parnas-affair/
no lnx
Sean Hannity and FOX News are up to their hair plugs in the Lev Parnas affair
Written by News Corpse, Daily Kos January 17, 2020
With each new day there are new and damning revelations affirming Donald Trump’s criminal behavior related to Ukraine and efforts to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden and subvert the 2020 election. The latest bombshells come from Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, whose nefarious activities include extorting Ukrainian President Zelensky and surveilling former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich.
Parnas was interviewed on MSNBC Wednesday by Rachel Maddow in a wide ranging discussion that made it clear that Trump “knew exactly what was going on” and was lying about his feigned ignorance of Parnas and his mission. But the evidence of Trump’s guilt is abundant. Also interesting is the evidence of Hannity’s guilt, and that of Fox News.
Proof is emerging of Hannity’s relationship with the Giuliani Crew. Hannity himself is in bed with Parnas. They have had communications that resulted in Hannity tweeting about bogus allegations of Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election to help Hillary Clinton. That tweet was deleted, but remains archived. Trump, however, didn’t delete his subsequent tweet promoting Hannity’s story on the subject that same night. Likewise, The Giuliani Crew also communicated with Don Trump Jr, who posted a tweet attacking Yovanovich. So their is an unbroken chain of propaganda circling around between Trump, Giuliani, his Ukraine mob, Fox News, and back to Trump and his crime family.
What’s more, Parnas had much to share about the complicity of Fox News in Trump’s plot to coerce Zelensky into helping him smear Biden. The Giuliani team worked with right-wing author John Solomon to disseminate their lies. At the time Solomon worked for The Hill, but is now employed by Fox News. So naturally Hannity unleashed a furious assault on Parnas and the network that hosted him. Hannity’s rage was so intense that he lapsed into the sort of incoherent outbursts you might hear from a paranoid schizophrenic on a street corner shouting at passing cars (The video wouldn’t load on dKos, but you can see it here). He began…
“Yesterday, last-ditch effort, Hail Mary, smear job, yup the congenital liar attached new documents to the articles of impeachment. Including so-called evidence from a former Giuliani contact. Oh by the way on conspiracy TV. The guy is facing federal charges from the Southern District of New York. You don’t really want to mess with those people.”
Did you follow that? Apparently Hannity is upset that new incriminating evidence about Trump has come out. But he can’t rebut any of it, so he unloads a barrage of nasty adjectives. He glosses over the fact that Parnas is working with Trump’s lawyer, but hones in on his having been indicted. And while Hannity is adamant that that’s a problem for Parnas, it doesn’t seem to be a problem for other Trump comrades who are under indictment or already convicted, including his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his personal attorney Michael Cohen, and his fixer Roger Stone. Hannity continued…
“So [Parnas] goes right to state-run MSDNC conspiracy channel media. Keep in mind when people like him, trying to stay out of jail, think about this, how many times have we heard from the liberals ‘oh you can’t waterboard, or use enhanced interrogation because people will say anything, they’ll lie to make it end.’ Well people trying to stay out of jail, in my humble opinion, they’ll say anything.”
Now Hannity thinks that MSNBC is “state-run” media. You have to wonder what state Hannity thinks that it’s being run out of. It must be the “Deep State.” And it’s cute that Hannity is trying to connect an indicted defendant giving testimony to waterboarding. No one has tortured Parnas. He is simply doing what many defendants do when faced with prosecution. He’s turning state’s evidence. That’s a voluntary action to secure a lighter sentence. And it does not have the pitfalls of torture, where victims will indeed say anything to make it stop. A defendant providing testimony must tell the truth or any agreement made with prosecutors is null and void.
However, Hannity’s description of defendants saying anything to stay out of jail actually fits Trump much better. After all, he is known to be a pathological liar anyway. And he doesn’t have any agreement with prosecutors to worry about voiding. He’s lying through his capped teeth to avoid prison. And he clearly doesn’t care what he says, or how ludicrous the lie, if he thinks it will either deflect from his guilt or help him to evade accountability. The whole lot of them are neck deep in criminal behavior. And if more disclosures like those Parnas is serving up come to pass, they are all going to be sharing a cell block.
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:{ Hannity melts down over report that the Trump administration is abandoning Uranium One investigation:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffffff;;fill:#ffffff;"):}:
01/10/20 10:45 PM EST
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:{Hannity hosts past Iran weapons dealer Oliver North to talk up new crisis:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
01/08/20 12:07 PM EST
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-different-are-sean-hannity-and-samantha-bee-a-media-scholar-explains-how-right-wing-outrage-and-left-liberal-satire-have-reshaped-our-world/
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Outrage in this context is directly tied to a prior work called “The Outrage Industry,” by Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj. I’m not speaking about outrage as the emotion, I’m talking about outrage as a genre, which they define explicitly as a genre that usually has a solo host who has a clear political point of view and whose opinions drive the editorial content of the program. They engage in didactic speech, slippery-slope language, and usually that brings us into the land of hyperbole — so the land of overstatement and exaggeration. The nature of the content of what they’re saying is generally slanted towards theidentification of threats — threats in the form of the people, policies and institutions — but they’re doing it in a way that has profound moral certainty. They’re morally serious, and they are certain about statements they are making.
What’s also important for the case that I’m building is that outrage has the trappings of news. It is supposed to be processed through the lens of serious information, not entertainment but serious information. Now sometimes these “analysis” programs, including Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Judge Jeanine Pirro, they’ll say, “No, no, no, I’m not a news show, you don’t have to hold me to the same standards as a journalist. I’m a talk-show host.” But then in the next breath they will double down on their seriousness and how important they are in terms of breaking news and providing important serious insight.
That is profoundly different from the kind of self-reflection we get from late-night comics and satirists, who really do not want to speak of their importance to the political process. They downplay their own moral seriousness, they downplay their importance in the political process.
So you’ve touched on how outrage and irony fit the psychologies of right and left. I’d like you to bring it center stage. What’s the most important thing we’ve learned?
In the last two decades, political psychologists have done experimental and survey work, and even physiological work, that has consistently pointed to distinct psychological traits between the left and the right.Liberals tend to be higher in tolerance for ambiguity. That means they are more comfortable with situations, schedules, routines and contexts that are uncertain, and they tend to have higher need for cognition, which simply means that they seek out and enjoy the process of working through information that is complex.
On the other hand, conservatives tend to be higher in need for closure. They are less tolerant of ambiguity, they are less comfortable with uncertainty, they like constructs, routines and situations that are predictable, ordered and fixed. They are lower in need for cognition, which, as I always say, is not an indication that conservatives are not smart. It’s not an indication that they don’t know things. It is an indication that they have a different motivation as they process information in the world. They are governed by peripheral cues, which are heuristics or shortcuts that allow them to efficiently tap into gut reactions or emotional reactions, and they do it in a way that is consistent across judgments over time. So they respond to things quickly and efficiently in a way that liberals do not.
Right. That makes sense.
These two packages to me seem to tap in intuitively to these genres — not only how they frame their arguments, but the entire spirit, aesthetic and package that they are delivered in. On the one hand, you have ironic satire, which as I have said is incomplete until the audience chimes in. It’s cognitively taxing. We know from studies with an fMRI machine that irony is actually quite complex to unpack in the brain. We also know that it is inherently an explicitly hybrid form of information, where political satirists are often delivering information and even news stories, but they’re framed as play and as entertainment. For liberals who are more tolerant of ambiguity and more comfortable with uncertainty, the fact that they’re kind of a hybrid — a little serious, a little play — they’re more open to that. They also really enjoy the process of unpacking and understanding and comprehending information that is layered, like irony.
On the other side, the reason that conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguity and a lower need for cognition is in part attributable to differences in brain structure and physiology that is more like a well-oiled machine designed to monitor for threat and respond to it. So conservatives are just more skilled at efficient quick responses to threats. That is what many psychologists believe leads to these psychological traits on the right.
Conservative outrage is so threat-oriented and presents information very clearly, very didactically. You don’t have to work to understand what Sean Hannity is saying.You don’t have to work to understand who he thinks we should be angry at, who we should fear, and what we should do about it. It’s very, very clear. He also — someone like Hannity, especially — presents himself as morally serious and as certain, as news for someone who would perhaps be less comfortable with that hybridity that you have in the world of satire.
Hannity, while he may technically be a hybrid show because he’s a little entertainment and is not really a journalist, he does everything he can to hide that from you. He speaks like someone who is to be trusted, there’s no room for questions. He has the information. Between that and the constant orientation toward threat,it’s really a fascinating kind of content to observe through that lens, because it really works so consistently with the conservative psychology. Sometimes when I was writing this book, I thought, “Doesn’t everybody know this already?” Because it feels like it works so well and it just makes so much sense....
- Tucker Carlson spread disinformation about a deadly chemical attack in Syria.
- Despite network policy, Fox’s Jeanine Pirro made a “surprise” GOP fundraising appearance.
- Fox & Friends lauded Rob Schneider for “standing up for free speech” without noting he was pushing anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.
- Tomi Lahren condemned the students who booed Melania Trump: “Can you imagine if this were Michelle Obama?” Yes we can!
- Sean Hannity told disgraced former host Bill O'Reilly to “go back on Fox”
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:{Three witnesses testified under oath that they were told the State Department contacted Sean Hannity. He denies it.:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
11/19/19 11:16
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escalator zero hedge to fox
Beyond social media, the claims first popularized by ZeroHedge were also featured on disreputable right-wing conspiracy theory websites Infowars and The Gateway Pundit as well as smaller such platforms including The Federalist Papers, WayneDupree.com, [your]News, The Daily Coin, and MAGA Daily Report. (*Hannity* and Fox “straight news” program *Fox News @ Night* later covered the Reuters report as well, while featuring pictures and a discussion of Hunter Biden.)
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fox-news-commentator-sean-hannity-appears-to-be-knee-deep-in-trumps-ukraine-scandal-despite-his-profusive-denials
no lnx
RUMPRELIGIOUS RIGHT#METOOGO AD FREE!MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION
Fox News commentator Sean Hannity appears to be knee-deep in Trump’s Ukraine scandal — despite his profuse denials
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon November 20, 2019
Fox News host Sean Hannity raved that he never spoke with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about ousted Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch after a third witness confirmed the alleged call to impeachment investigators.
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David Hale, the undersecretary of State for political affairs, testified under oath that Yovanovitch was the victim of a baseless smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of President Donald Trump, which led to her ouster. According to a transcript of the closed-door deposition released Monday, the smears originally stemmed from the conservative columnist John Solomon, who wrote in The Hill that former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had claimed that Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute list.” Lutsenko later retracted that claim.
Hale, the third-ranking official at the department, claimed to impeachment investigators that Hannity had pushed the same narrative on Fox News and that Pompeo had reached out to Trump’s favorite host.
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“It did come up at some point with the secretary,” Hale said. “I understood that he did call Sean Hannity.”
Hale testified that Pompeo told Hannity, “I need to see what the evidence is.”
The State official added that no one at the department believed the allegations against Yovanovitch, though officials did not act to prevent her ouster.
Hale’s testimony is backed up by both Yovanovitch and George Kent, another senior State Department official.
Yovanovitch testified at her closed-door deposition that she was told Pompeo “was going to place a call to Mr. Hannity on Fox News to say, you know, ‘What is going on? I mean, do you have proof of these kinds of allegations or not? And if you have proof, you know, tell me, and if not, stop.’”
“I understand that that call was made,” she added. “I don’t know whether it was the secretary of somebody else in his inner circle, and for a time, you know, things kind of simmered down.”
Kent testified under oath that Solomon’s report was “primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs.”
Kent testified that a top official at the State Department reached out to Hannity but said it may not have been Pompeo.
“I believe, to the best of my recollection, the counselor for the department, Ulrich Brechbuhl, reached out and suggested to Mr.Hannity that if there was no proof of the allegations, that he should stop covering them,” Kent said.
Hannity previously called Yovanovitch’s testimony “fake news” and claimed that he did not “know anything about this woman.”
The host went off on his Fox News show Monday after Hale’s testimony was released.
“So apparently David Hale’s testimony was released a short time ago, and he says in the transcript it was his understanding that Pompeo called me to ask you what evidence you had of allegations regarding Yovanovitch,”Hannity told guest Gregg Jarrett. “Gregg, how many times do I have to say it? We barely mentioned this woman! Four times in passing. No, I never got a call from Secretary of State Pompeo or anybody else. Why would they lie about this?”
“You are being smeared,” replied Jarrett, the network’s legal analyst. “Donald Trump has been smeared for three years.”
Acyn Torabi
@Acyn
Sean Hannity addresses David Hale’s testimony by reiterating the same denial and asking “why would they lie about this”
Gregg Jarrett says Hannity is being smeared
The testimony Hannity is denying was given under oath while Hannity’s denials are not
Embedded video
Even as he called Yovanovitch’s testimony “fake news” earlier this month, Hannity conceded that “her name came up a few times on the show” and that he “did ask one question about a news report if she was involved in something.”
“It was a question,” he said, “We do news here.” (While his show appears on Fox News, Hannity is a political commentator.)
Hannity referenced Solomon’s report, which has not been retracted despite his main source walking back his comments. Solomon was a frequent guest on Hannity’s show. The question Hannity mentioned was to attorney Joe diGenova, who Trump wanted to add to his legal team. DiGenova played his own role in Trump’s Ukraine saga and received an advance copy ofSolomon’s reporting linking the State Department’s work in Ukraine to billionaire Democratic donor George Soros.
Shortly after Kent testified publicly, diGenova was back on Fox airwaves pushing the baseless Soros conspiracy theory.
“There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department,” he told Fox host Lou Dobbs.“He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs — work with NGOs. That was very evident in Ukraine, and Kent was part of that. He was a very big protector of Soros.”
Soros’ Open Society Foundations ripped the network for airing diGenova’s conspiracy theory in a letter to Fox News head Suzanne Scott.
“It is bad enough that Mr. Dobbs continues to repeat the widely discredited reporting of John Solomon . . . that has been debunked by the U.S. State Department and recanted by Mr. Solomon’s main source,” the letter said, adding that diGenova’s comment was “beyond rhetorical ugliness, beyond fiction, beyond ludicrous. It’s patently untrue; it’s not even possible. This is McCarthyite.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/sean-hannity-denies-discussing-ambassador-with-pompeo-after-testimony-release/
no lnx
Sean Hannity denies discussing ambassador with Pompeo after testimony release
Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon November 6, 2019
Fox News host Sean Hannity denied ever speaking with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about alleged efforts by conservative news outlets to smear a former American ambassador to Ukraine perceived as unsympathetic to the goal of soliciting dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
Claiming that he had been in contact with Pompeo, Hannity decried the diplomat’s testimony as “fake news,” which had been “obsessively, compulsively reported on fake news CNN and other outlets.”
“The ambassador was barely ever mentioned on our show,” Hannity said Monday evening on his primetime program. “We went back and looked. I don’t know anything about this woman, to be honest. Her name came up a few times on the show. She was an Obama holdover. I did ask one question about a news report — if she was involved in something. It was a question. We do news here.”
He repeated, “I never talked to Secretary Pompeo about Ukraine. I never talked to anyone at the State Department about this ambassador. Sorry to burst your fake news bubble.”
Hannity then insisted that the real story was the “obvious Biden family corruption” in Ukraine.
The Fox News host expressed similar thoughts on Twitter on Monday, writing: “Breaking fake news! Never ever talked to Secy Pompeo about Ukraine PERIOD! Fake News CNN trying to boost their ratings by showing me. Biased Zucker needs to start paying me.”
In the transcript of former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony before Congress last month, the former State Department official was asked whether Pompeo had made any attempts to defend her as she was being attacked by the president’s layer, Rudy Giuliani, and his son, Don Jr.
“What I was told by Phil Reeker was that the secretary or perhaps somebody around him was going to place a call to Mr. Hannity on Fox News to say, ‘You know, what is going on? I mean, do you have proof of these kinds of allegations or not? And if you have proof, you know, telI me, and if not, stop,’” Yovanovitch told Congress.
She added, “And I understand that that call was made. I don’t know whether it was the secretary or somebody else in his inner circle. And for a time, you know, things kind of simmered down.”
Despite Hannity insisting otherwise, there is no evidence that Biden committed any wrongdoing in his dealings with Ukraine. Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was removed from power because groups such as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the Obama administration government felt he was not doing enough to root out corruption in the country.
A whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump had attempted to solicit Ukraine to provide him with dirt on Biden in exchange for military aid triggered an impeachment inquiry.
Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.
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trump’s lawless Republican mob was egged on by Sean Hannity
David Cay Johnston / DC Report
The Republican gang that crashed a secure hearing room on Capitol Hill Wednesday was no flash mob. Donald Trump, working with junior Republican House members, arranged the stunt, equally lawless…
https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/giuliani-associates-arrested-trying-flee-country-were-reportedly-their-way-set
hannity
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also mma worries calls to djt recorded
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:{Fox News chyron: “Hannity sources: Disastrous day for Dems in their secret Soviet-style impeachment attempt”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
10/17/19 9:27 PM
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omg this could finish djt? 10/18/19
https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/how-conservative-writer-john-solomon-served-conduit-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-conspiracy
At the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump lies a disinformation campaign led by his personal attorneyRudy Giuliani that was aided and abetted by conservative writer John Solomon. Through Solomon, Giuliani injected his disinformation campaign straight into the heart of conservative media -- Fox News -- with seemingly full knowledge of at least some at Fox. And eventually, Solomon landed a job at the network.
It is now known that Trump blessed Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, in which he sought information that would undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election to benefit Trump. Giuliani was also trying to dig up dirt to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.
Much attention has focused on Giuliani’s actions and the shady cast of characters he worked with, but less has been paid to the right-wing media figures who colluded with the president’s lawyer to make his smear campaign public -- a plan that came dangerously close to succeeding.
What follows is a case study in how right-wing media work hand in hand with Trump cronies to smear his enemies, undermine democracy, and defend the president at all costs.
Here’s how it went down.
Key Takeaways
- Rudy Giuliani, working with con men and Trump cronies, pursued an “investigation” in Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.
- In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon.
- The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.
- Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine.
- 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, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.
- On October 5, John Solomon landed a job at Fox.
Key players
Rudy Giuliani -- the president’s personal attorney who has traveled around the globe attempting to dig up dirt on Democrats and discredit the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two Soviet-born con men with ties to Ukraine who worked with Giuliani to concoct the disinformation campaign and to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired, reportedly in the hopes of advancing their business interests in the country. The two have since been arrested for campaign finance violations related to making allegedly illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, as well as a pro-Trump super PAC. They also reportedly worked for Dmitry Firtash.
Dmitry Firtash -- a Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch and former businessassociate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. At the same time Parnas and Fruman were working with Giuliani, the two were reportedly also working on Firtash’s behalf to push for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as part of a plan to install new leadership at Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas company. Part of this plan reportedly would have included Naftogaz paying “Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.” NBC reported that while this was happening, Firtash “was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.”
Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova -- two attorneys closely tied to Trump who also worked with Giuliani to support his efforts in Ukraine. The duo are known for their role in bolstering conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and at one point were considered to join Trump’s personal legal team. The two quietly represent Dmitry Firtash in fighting his extradition to the United States. They hired Parnas as an “interpreter” to work with them on the Firtash case while Parnas was also working with Giuliani.
John Solomon -- a conservative columnist who until recently was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon was the conduit through which Giuliani, Parnas, Toensing and diGenova planted their stories in order to spread their coordinated disinformation campaign through the media.
Sean Hannity -- Fox News host who is close to Trump and worked with Giuliani to make his show an integral part of their media strategy, providing a place where they could sow the seeds of the smear campaign against Biden. Giuliani and Hannity discussed this strategy in January, and Solomon became a staple on Hannity’s prime-time programming.
The plan
According to Parnas, his friendship with Giuliani began two years ago as they were running in similar political circles and attending the same events. In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman began connecting Giuliani to a network of disgraced former and current Ukrainian officials and prosecutors to dig up dirt on Biden and the 2016 election.
The conspiracy theory they concocted went like this: Ukrainian officials worked with Democrats to find dirt on Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to damage Trump. They did so, Giuliani claimed, by fabricating the “black ledger” that showed that Manafort had received millions of dollars from the former pro-Russia Ukrainian ruling party that had been recently overthrown. The revelation of this ledger helped force Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign, and Manafort was eventually prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election.
In addition, according to Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, the Ukrainian Embassy was working with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in return, the American Embassy and the Obama administration actively blocked investigations in Ukraine that Giuliani claims targeted Democrats’ political allies. As with most conspiracy theories on the right, George Soros is involved in this one too. The theory posits that a Ukrainian good governance, anti-corruption group -- the Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) -- was involved in framing Manafort and was corruptly tied to an FBI agent who was investigating Manafort. Giuliani also claims that an investigation into the group was shut down due to U.S. pressure and that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine provided Ukrainian officials with a “do not prosecute” list that included people linked to AntAC. As a bonus, through the “investigation,” Giuliani claims to have been presented with evidence that then-Vice President Biden acted corruptly by withholding U.S. aid to force the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son.
Nothing about this conspiracy theory is true. First, there’s no evidence that the infamous “black ledger” was fraudulent, and several payments listed in the document have been confirmed to be accurate. The Intercept reported: “Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments” said that “Giuliani ‘is a liar’ for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. ‘It is a real document, with real signatures,’ Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts.” Giuliani seems to have adopted the false claim about the ledger from Manafort, whose legal team has embraced it since 2017 and whom Guiliani has been meeting with to discuss the materials.
As for Giuliani’s claims that investigations into AntAC were dropped due to political pressure, the State Department has called claims of a so-called “do not prosecute” list “complete poppycock.” And an investigation into the group’s handling of foreign aid money was widely believed to be politically motivated retaliation for the group’s anti-corruption work. Finally, while Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was roundly criticized for blocking corruption investigations, there’s no evidence that he did so to benefit his son. In reality, the push to get the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, fired was a part of an anti-corruption effort by advocates and international supporters of Ukraine. The United States’ well-established position was that ousting Shokin was a critical aspect of anti-corruption measures. The investigation into the energy company whose board included Hunter Biden was long dormant, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of the investigation.
Nonetheless, Giuliani says he completed his “investigation” in March and sent his findings to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the understanding that Pompeo would investigate. (NBCNews.com, however, reported: “A source with knowledge of the events said ... that Pompeo never promised Rudy Giuliani that he would investigate the contents of the envelope or anything related to Ukraine.”) Giuliani also sent the materials to Solomon.
NBCNews.com obtained a copy of the documents that Giuliani sent to the State Department in March and reported that they contained “a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News.” NBC said the “documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” The materials Giuliani sent included interview notes from interviews he conducted with then-current and former Ukrainian prosecutors that “paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.”
The media strategy
Giuliani and associates feed story to Solomon
Around the same time Giuliani sent his packet of materials to the State Department, he also sent the materials to Solomon, who began reporting on its contents through the opinion pages of The Hill without identifying the materials as having originated with Giuliani. Solomon’s writing for some time had focused heavily around trying to discredit the Mueller investigation and the notion that Russia meddled into the 2016 elections to help Trump. On March 20, he published the first of many scoops specifically related to Ukraine’s involvement in this effort. Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which primarily focused on Ukraine.
In his reporting, Solomon spelled out Giuliani’s conspiracy theory in detail. For instance:
- He reported that Ukrainian officials claimed to have “evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” at least some of it related to Biden.
- Solomon reported that these officials tried to “deliver their evidence to Washington” but were unable because the American ambassador (Yovanovitch) “blocked” them “from obtaining a visa” to the U.S.
- He weaved an elaborate story about Americans working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign manager Manafort, in order to damage Trump.
- He claimed that the infamous “black ledger” that showed Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian officials was fabricated andreleased to damage Trump. He also suggested that in January 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice pressured Ukraine to help the department investigate Manafort in response to Trump’s rise in popularity in the Republican primary race (Manafort did not join the Trump campaign until March 2016).
- He strongly suggested that the Obama State Department pressured Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a Ukrainian good governance group linked to Soros because Soros backed Clinton.
- He also claimed the U.S. ambassador’s “do not prosecute” list included people related to this organization, and he strained to link the group to the Manafort investigation by claiming that an FBI agent involved in the investigation is tied to the same group.
- And, of course, he claimedthat Biden withheld a billion dollars worth of U.S. aid to shut down an investigation into Burisma Holdings and Biden’s son Hunter through his position on the company’s board.
Solomon’s reporting relies heavily on the sources Giuliani fed him. In an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani named three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors as persons he interviewed, specifically former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, and Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Giuliani is also known to have met with a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andrii Telizhenko and is linked to Kostiantyn Kulyk -- Lutsenko’s deputy who was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. Eight of the twelve columns Solomon wrote on the topic featured at least one of these five sources.
At least three of Solomon’s columns feature information meant to undermine the validity of the Russia investigation that may have been leaked from the Ukrainian pro-Russia oligarch Dmitry Firtash’s legal team, which included diGenova and Toensing. Toensing and diGenova have been working with Firtash since at least July -- and indeed Solomon published an entire column in July based exclusively off material and anonymous sources from Firtash’s legal team. They appear to have been involved with his case much earlier than July, though.
Included in the material Giuliani sent to the State Department is a March 26 email from Solomon -- titled “Fwd: Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” -- in which Solomon forwarded a draft of his article before it was published to the same three people working with Giuliani who are also known to have been working with Firtash -- Parnas, Toensing, and diGenova. The column was the first of three that mentioned Firtash, and it attempted to tie AntAC -- and through it Soros -- “to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort.” Solomon repeated the suggestion in his August 7 column on Soros’ “secret 2016 access” to State Department officials. In a fourth column, Solomon reported on an affidavit of a former Ukrainian prosecutor that he exclusively received. The affidavit was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”
Solomon brings the conspiracy theory to Fox
The next stage in the plan involved Solomon taking his “scoop” to Fox News, specifically to SeanHannity. From March 20 -- when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory -- through October 2, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that “deep state” elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump. Giuliani also appeared on those networks frequently, clocking in at least 64 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business during that time period. Toensing and diGenova appeared over 75 times on the two networks during this period.
The fact that they were working together on these stories, or -- in the case of Toensing and diGenova -- that they were legally representing Firtash, was certainly not transparent to viewers. In perhaps the most egregious example, on the September 26 episode of Hannity, Hannity hosted Solomon to report on an affidavit he obtained from the disgraced prosecutor Shokin, who claimed he was forced to resign to stop the investigation into the company connected to Hunter Biden. Hannity then hosted diGenova and Toensing to discuss it, and the two hailed the affidavit as proof of their conspiracy theory and declared it would “shoot a hole in” Biden’s defense.
However, the affidavit states that it was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” In other words, diGenova and Toensing were part of the legal team that produced the affidavit that Solomon later exclusively obtained, wrote up, and then took to Hannity -- a fact not mentioned by any of them. Giuliani has since repeatedly referenced this affidavit in numerous media appearances to support his claims about Biden’s alleged corruption.
Hannity repeatedly gave clues suggesting he knew the full range of stories Solomon would be reporting. For instance, despite the fact that Solomon’s March 20 column did not mention Biden or corruption, Hannity teased on his radio show that day that “I just happen to have a little birdie telling me in my ear that, well, Joe Biden may have an issue here that is bigger than anything ever alleged about Donald Trump.” On September 23, Hannity and Giuliani admitted to having talked about the Biden Ukraine story as early as January.
The payoff
Giuliani repeatedly touted and praised Solomon’s “blockbuster” reporting. He has at least twice opined that Solomon should “get a Pulitzer Prize” and has taken to Twitter to sing Solomon’s praises:
Hannity, too, repeatedly praised Solomon’s “great reporting” as he hyped Solomon’s columns. He regularly described Solomon as a “friend” of the program and declared that mainstream news outlets, like The New York Times, “peddled lies, conspiracy theories and hoax[es]” about the Russia investigation whereas Solomon “was right” all along. On April 25, Hannity asked Trump about Solomon’s and others' reporting around the Russia investigation, and the president replied: “These are great reporters. … These are people that should be getting Pulitzers.” Trump added, “These are the ones that should be winning. It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine.”
Solomon’s efforts paid off. On October 5, Fox News confirmed that John Solomon had joined the network as a contributor. During his first appearance on Hannity as an official Fox News employee, Hannity said: “John Solomon, welcome to the family. It’s been a long time coming, sir.”
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:{Hannity and Eric Trump agree “there is no question” the Ukraine scandal “starts with Obama”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
10/09/19 10:29 PM EDT
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/sean-hannitys-bizarre-fixation-on-hillary-clinton-exposed-in-new-review-of-his-primetime-show/
no lnx
Sean Hannity’s bizarre fixation on Hillary Clinton exposed in new review of his primetime show
Written by Shira Tarlo / Salon September 11, 2019
It has been nearly three years since President Donald Trump clinched the White House, however Fox News host Sean Hannity has remained fixated on the Democrat nominated in the 2016 elections: Hillary Clinton.
During the last presidential election cycle, Hannity labeled his primetime show the “Stop-Hillary Express” because of its sustained focus on defeating the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. In the more than two years since Trump defeated Clinton and seized control of the White House, it appears the one-time conductor has continued taking his viewers for a ride on the anti-Clinton train.
From Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 through August 2019, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 505 of the 587 episodes of his program — a figure that represents 86 percent of his shows — according to a review conducted by Media Matters for America, a progressive news watchdog. And if you include mentions from guests, Clinton’s name was dropped in a staggering 91 percent of the episodes Hannity hosted over that time period.
Hannity’s apparent obsession with Clinton is “largely a reflection of his show’s focus on the dizzying conspiracy theory he constructed to defend Trump” from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters.
Gertz further explained: “Hannity places Clinton at the center of several key strands of that web. In his telling, 1) federal investigators should have been charging Clinton for crimes related to her email server rather than looking into Trump’s associates; 2) some of the attorneys involved in the probe had conflicts of interest because they supported her election; and 3) the investigators ignored the ‘real’ collusion with Russia that she supposedly engaged in through the Uranium One pseudoscandal and via an anti-Trump dossier that became part of the investigation.”
Since Clinton largely receded from the national political spotlight in the wake of her defeat, Hannity’s references to the former presidential hopeful decreased in each of the first four months of Trump’s administration, according to Media Matters.
In 2017, Hannity mentioned Clinton in 88 percent of the episodes he hosted in January after Trump’s inauguration, 76 percent in February, 70 percent in March and just 39 percent in April, the lowest total over the course of the study. That figure spiked to 79 percent in May. Since then, Hannity’s mentions haven’t fallen below 60 percent in any month since October of 2017.
Gertz noted that the longest consecutive streak in which Hannity mentioned Clinton on the shows he has hosted was 60 — from April 8, 2019 to July 12, 2019. Hannity did not mention Clinton on five shows he hosted between April 26, 2017, through May 2, 2017, the longest consecutive streak in which the Fox News host did not name-drop Clinton.
“When Hannity takes a night off, the ‘stop-Hillary express’ rolls on, as the show typically features the same guests and themes, including the Clinton-focused anti-Mueller conspiracy theory,” Gertz concluded. “His guest hosts mentioned Clinton in 63% of their episodes, and she was mentioned in 85% of the episodes they hosted during the period of the study.”
Watch the astonishing supercut of Hannity’s Clinton name-drops here:
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mma
By the time that Trump tweeted and then told journalists at the White House that Alabama would be hit hard by Hurricane Dorian, it was obvious that he was wrong. Instead of admitting that he was referring to well-out-of-date forecasts, Trump has spent a week insisting he was correct (including changing a map with a marker) and attacking media outlets who point out he was lying. Fox propagandists were the rare allies who leapt to his defense.
Sean Hannity had a full meltdown in defense of Trump, complaining of "psychotic jackasses in the media mob." When his guest - a prominent climate change denier - even said that Trump was wrong, Hannity began speaking over him and said that they were out of time.
Lou Dobbs seemed giddy about Trump continuing to keep pushing the lie, saying of the media: "You mess with the bull, you get the horn.” avoided filming violence from right-wing protesters. Geraldo Rivera said that Trump was "unfairly mugged by the media." Fox News host Howard Kurtz attackedthe media for covering Trump's repeated lies about a natural disaster.
At one point this week, Trump even called Fox News' John Roberts into the Oval Office to talk with him about his statements.
This all raises the question of why Trump was relying on days-old information about a natural disaster. And aside from golfing, Trump spent a significant amount of time in the days that Dorian's trajectory turned away from Alabama livetweeting Fox News.
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Defending Trump's lie about Alabama and Dorian is peak Sean Hannity
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this is the inverse of mueller as savior?
Following the confirmation of William Barr to the position of attorney general in February, Sean Hannity pushed one message: Investigate the president’s political enemies, or suffer the consequences. It appears Hannity got his wish.
This week, Trump’s campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave up the game. In an interview on his radio show, Hannity stated that Trump is opposed by “pretty much everybody except for like me” and subsequently asked McEnany to assess the impact that “the media mob” would have on the 2020 election. McEnany responded, “Yeah, the work that you do every night, Sean, is going to go a long way. It already has. We now have the Justice Department looking into the misdeeds of the Obama administration."
Hannity and Fox have long shilled for the president, attacking his enemies and shielding him from criticism at every turn. However, attributing a federal investigation to Hannity takes the network’s influence to a new level.
As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz pointed out this week, “It was inevitable for Hannity’s pro-Trump commentary to become the foundation of the president’s reelection campaign. That the campaign acknowledges that messaging might come via a federal investigation is an ominous sign.”
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no lnx charts
REPORT: ACORN OBSESSION: Beck, Hannity obsess over ACORN while virtually ignoring major corruption scandals
WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF
PUBLISHED 09/23/09 4:33 PM EDT
In light of the recent attention Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have devoted to a supposed corruption scandal involving ACORN, Media Matters for America reviewed the coverage each host has provided on his respective television programs to a selection of well-documented political scandals and instances of corruption by companies that have received thousands of times more money from the government than ACORN has in the past 15 years. Our findings show that both hosts have been obsessed with ACORN, devoting a massively disproportionate amount of attention to the story in comparison to their coverage of controversies involving military contractors that have received billions of dollars in federal contracts and instances of Republican corruption at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Furthermore, since Beck joined Fox News, the amount of attention he has devoted to ACORN has skyrocketed, while his interest in other corruption scandals has remained limited.
Key findings
Number of times Beck's and Hannity's programs, combined, referenced ACORN, Abramoff, Blackwater, and Halliburton/KBR from May 8, 2006, to September 18, 2009 (NOTE: For the purposes of this study, a “reference” is defined as the specified topic having been mentioned by either a host or a guest on the program being studied.):
ACORN: 1,502
Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH): 62
Blackwater/Xe: 4
Halliburton/KBR: 43
Conclusions:
Beck's and Hannity's programs were approximately 35 times more likely to reference ACORN than any of the military contractors.
Beck's and Hannity's programs were approximately 24 times more likely to reference ACORN than either Abramoff or Ney.
The numbers are equally shocking for each show individually:
Beck's programs were approximately 50 times more likely to reference ACORN than any of the military contractors and approximately 149 times more likely to discuss ACORN than either Abramoff or Ney.
Hannity's programs were approximately 18 times more likely to reference ACORN than any of the military contractors and approximately eight times more likely to discuss ACORN than either Abramoff or Ney.
What a difference Fox News makes -- after leaving CNN's Headline News and joining Fox in January, Beck's focus on ACORN skyrocketed, while his disinterest in major corruption scandals continued:
References to ACORN on Beck's Headline News program:
ACORN
Abramoff/Ney
Blackwater/Xe
Halliburton/KBR
43
7
2
11
References to ACORN on Beck's Fox News program:
ACORN
Abramoff/Ney
Blackwater/Xe
Halliburton/KBR
1,002
0
0
8
Reporting on ACORN, Beck and Hannity claim to be concerned with government waste and corruption
Beck implores viewers to “take a stand” because "[t]his is clear-cut, unadulterated, taxpayer-funded corruption" at ACORN due to its receipt of government funding. On the September 15 edition of his Fox News program, Beck aired portions of an undercover video at a California ACORN office and stated (from the Nexis database):
BECK: I am just asking you this -- please, take a stand. Take a stand. This is clear-cut, unadulterated, taxpayer-funded corruption. You love your children. You love your country just like I do. You must understand that what you've been seeing from ACORN on these tapes this past week isn't compassion, it's corruption!
I'm asking you -- demand a full investigation from your representatives of everybody -- ACORN, all the way to the top, everybody in government, all the way to the top, in your cities, and in our nation. And until that corruption is brought under control, we must quarantine Washington, D.C. -- no legislation must come out of it.
Hannity: “The only question that remains is, will this keep ACORN from receiving our tax dollars?” From the September 16 edition of Hannity (from Nexis):
HANNITY: Now the employees in five separate ACORN offices have now showed themselves willing to aid and in some cases participate in child prostitution. Now predictably, ACORN is retaliating by attacking the individuals who exposed them and threatening them with lawsuits.
But the videos, they speak for themselves. The only question that remains is, will this keep ACORN from receiving our tax dollars?
And here with reaction is the author of the best-selling book, “Culture of Corruption,” Michelle Malkin is back with us.
You know, if you look at the money and follow the money, tens and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to date, Michelle. And if you add the stimulus, you're looking, you know, at potentially $8.5 billion more. So there are -- there is an effort in Congress to stop it. Will it be successful?
MICHELLE MALKIN, “THE CULTURE OF CORRUPTION” AUTHOR: Well, it already has, in some measure. And I think that cutting off ACORN from the Census Bureau partnerships was a big first step, and then of course in the Senate cutting off transportation and HUD appropriations money from ACORN and all of its affiliates.
I think that's very important. I called up Senator Mike Johan's office the other day just to clarify and make sure that it's not just ACORN, the national umbrella group, but all of the web of its affiliates and entities under it that are nonprofit, tax exempt and supposedly nonpartisan.
So all these are a good first step. But I think that the next step, Sean, obviously, is to crack open the books and take a look at how the money they currently have been allocated and allocated in the past is being spent. And that's going to be an incredible forensic undertaking. And hopefully it will be bipartisan.
HANNITY: You talk about these umbrella groups. There's all these groups that would then, you know, sort of subcontract out to ACORN. So it's almost difficult to do the accounting. But the reality is, and I know Governor Tim Pawlenty and I know some others, Richard Shelby was on this morning, and he is working in Washington.
They're saying they want to find a way to get to the real bottom line dollar figure of how much they are getting and cut off all funds because this is only part of the corruption. I mean it's bad enough every office they went to showed a connection, you know, to some of these scandals. But it goes a lot deeper, doesn't it?
MALKIN: It's systemic. And I'll tell you, ACORN plays a game of throwing its rank and file operatives under the bus and then claiming that these were just the indefensible actions of a few, a handful. That's the phrase that Bertha Lewis and the ACORN brass are using.
Both hosts have largely ignored major scandals involving military contractors that have huge government contracts
Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater have received tens of billions of dollars in military contracts and have been connected to major scandals, some even resulting in death. Major controversies concerning work performed by Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown and Root (a Halliburton subsidiary), and Blackwater (now named Xe) broke between 2006 and 2009. According to news reports, Blackwater, Halliburton, and KBR have received a combined total of at least $25 billion dollars in federal contracts since 2001. By comparison, ACORN has received an estimated $53 million in federal funding over the past 15 years, which is an average of $3.5 million per year....
==
mma 819
:{Trump campaign is crediting Hannity with launching a DOJ investigation into the Obama administration, and they’re probably right:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
08/28/19 12:36 PM EDT
did mueller antic/ dread rw fox BS attacks? modulated accordingly?!
ailes and atwater used tv to get bush41 electd in a way unprecedented? sorta bypass party? here merge of gop and fox:
For years, Sean Hannity has poisoned the well for special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. That effort came to a head when Mueller testified before two House committees, with Hannity effectively dictatingthe GOP’s strategy in handling Mueller. The night before the hearings, he urged congressional Republicans to focus their attention not on the results of the investigation, but on the investigators. And that’s exactly what many of them did, using questions ripped from Hannity’s program to demand Mueller weigh in on the network’s conspiracy theories.
One House Republican cited Gregg Jarrett, the Fox legal analyst who once argued on Hannity’s show that in light of the Mueller probe, “the FBI has become America’s secret police” like “the old KBG.” Another entered into the record an op-ed he had written for Hannity’s website. Others championed Hannity’s feverish focus on tangential topics like former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s memos, the research firm Fusion GPS and its founder, Glenn Simpson, and the purported political leanings of Mueller’s staff.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a Hannity regular, devoted much of his opening statement during the afternoon hearing to the Fox host’s twisted theory that the real collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign was between Russia and the Democrats.
Watch this: We put together a full supercut of Hannity and other Fox figures juxtaposed with Republicans during the hearings, and it is utterly uncanny. There can be no more denying the facts: Fox News and the Republican Party have merged.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/heres-the-insidious-role-sean-hannity-played-in-derailing-al-frankens-political-career/
no lnx
Here’s the insidious role Sean Hannity played in derailing Al Franken’s political career
Written by Alex Henderson July 22, 2019
The U.S. Senate lost one of its most prominent liberals when Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, dogged by sexual harassment allegations, announced his resignation in December 2017. Some of Franken’s defenders believed the Democratic Party was too quick to throw him under the bus; other Democrats stressed that in light of the #MeToo movement, his resignation was absolutely necessary. Franken’s political downfall is the subject of an in-depth report by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who describes — among many other things — the role that Fox News’ Sean Hannity played in the media firestorm.
Franken’s career in the Senate, Mayer notes, was doomed after right-wing talk radio host Leeann Tweeden “accused him of having forced an unwanted kiss on her during a 2006 USO tour.” After that, Mayer adds, seven other women “followed with accusations against Franken; all of them centered on inappropriate touches or kisses.”
Mayer reports that the former “Saturday Night Live” star’s “undoing began with a photograph, which was released by a conservative talk-radio station on November 16, 2017.” Mayer reports that in the photo, Franken was seen on a military plane “leering at the lens with his hands outstretched toward the breasts of his USO co-star, Tweeden…. Franken’s hands appear to be practically touching her chest, and Tweeden looks to be asleep — and therefore, not consenting to the joke.”
Condemnation of Franken, Mayer recalls, quickly came from the liberal-leaning Slate (which called for his resignation in an article) as well as the right-wing media — including Fox News, where Hannity quoted the Slate piece and interviewed Tweeden (who is described by Mayer as “a friend who had been a guest on his show dozens of times”). And the alt-right Breitbart News, Mayer notes, drew attention to Slate’s article as well.
Mayer reports, “The media uproar was further heightened by an impassioned personal statement released by Tweeden’s Los Angeles radio station, KABC-AM, which provided her account of the story behind the photograph.”
Hannity, Mayer recalls, “exulted when the news broke,” relentlessly attacking Franken on both Fox News and his AM radio show. Hannity described the photo as “disgusting,” saying that the Minnesota senator had been accused of “sexual molestation”— and President Donald Trump, Mayer reports, “joined the fray on Twitter, insinuating that the photograph documented an assault in progress.”
Mayer is an incredibly thorough reporter, and her New Yorker piece features interviews with women who express a variety of views on Franken’s political downfall. Some of the interviewees Mayer spoke to are more sympathetic to Franken than others.
One of the more sympathetic is attorney Deborah Katz, who has represented sexual harassment victims. Katz has also represented Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her at a party when they were teenagers back in 1982.
Katz, according to Mayer, views Franken as a “cautionary tale for the #MeToo movement.” The attorney told the New Yorker, “The allegations leveled against Sen. Franken did not warrant his forced expulsion from the Senate, particularly given the context in which most of the behavior occurred — which was in his capacity as a comedian….. All offensive behavior should be addressed, but not all offensive behavior warrants the most severe sanction.”
==
ref mayer
...===
mayer on franken
According to McIntyre, Hannity wanted to use the photograph in 2007, when it would have derailed Franken’s first Senate bid. But he deferred to Tweeden, who feared that, because she had been a lingerie model, her credibility would be attacked. “To Sean Hannity’s credit, he never said a word about it,” McIntyre told me. (Hannity, through a spokesperson, praised Tweeden as “patriotic” and called Franken “literally insane.”) McIntyre emphasized that Tweeden and KABC-AM deliberately chose not to break the story with Hannity, or on Fox, because they didn’t want it to be tainted with charges of political bias.
:{
}:
There was a history of deep animosity between Fox News’ conservative hosts and Franken. Fox sued Franken over his 2003 best-seller, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” which relentlessly disparages the network and its big star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. It includes a chapter mocking Hannity as, among other things, “an angry, Irish Ape-man.” Franken writes that, after having a greenroom shouting match with Hannity about Rush Limbaugh, in 1996, he “had never in my life hated a person more.” Fox dropped the suit, but O’Reilly reportedly threatened vengeance.
When Andrea Mackris later sued O’Reilly for sexually harassing her while she was a producer at Fox News, she revealed that, in 2004, O’Reilly had told her, “If you cross Fox News Channel, it’s not just me, it’s Roger Ailes”—at the time the head of the network—“who will go after you. . . . Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what’s coming to them but never sees it coming. Look at Al Franken, one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever. That day will happen, trust me.” When Tweeden accused Franken, one of his wife’s first thoughts was of O’Reilly’s prediction.
...Tweeden began working through every detail with McIntyre and Baker, and, later, with Hayes. McIntyre also suggested that Tweeden talk to her friend Lauren Sivan, a former anchor for the station, who was one of the witnesses against Weinstein. Sivan had risked her reputation to speak out about Weinstein’s having masturbated in front of her. When Tweeden told her about Franken, Sivan said to me, “the story, it was strange—because they were doing it as a skit.” She sympathized with Tweeden, whom she described as having felt “mocked and humiliated” by Franken. But she wasn’t sure how a public accusation would be received. She suggested that Tweeden take the story to a mainstream outlet, and even gave her the name of a reputable reporter. Instead, Sivan told me, Hayes controlled the process, which she considered a “mistake,” because “it’s a right-wing conservative radio station” and “it seemed like they just wanted to milk the story.” Nevertheless, Sivan said, of Tweeden, “it was absolutely something she wanted to do—I think she hated Franken.”
A week before Tweeden went public, Roy Moore,the Republican nominee in a special Senate election in Alabama, was accused of engaging in inappropriate behavior with several teen-age girls, one of whom was fourteen at the time. Moore denied the allegations, and Trump, who had endorsed Moore, stuck by him. But the allegations handed Democrats a wedge issue and put Republicans on the defensive. Hannity was particularly on the spot: having dismissed Moore’s conduct as “consensual” and mere “kissing,” he issued a rare on-air apology.
:{
}:
At the same time that the Republican Party was contending with the scandal, Franken was rising in prominence, in part because of his deft cross-examinations of such Trump Administration appointees as Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry. Bystanders applauded when Franken walked into Washington restaurants. His latest book had reached No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.Feminists had welcomed his support of the #MeToo movement, and praised him for drafting a bill to prohibit mandatory arbitration in employment-related cases of sexual harassment and discrimination. The legislation would guarantee women the right to publicly press charges, rather than submit to secret settlements. He was also praised for supporting advanced training for law-enforcement officers who dealt with rape victims.
:{
}:
But along with the adulation came detractors. Several far-right news sites appear to have known about Tweeden’s story shortly before it broke. In Southern California, a gossip Web site, Crazy Days and Nights, was contacted by an anonymous tipster who predicted that Franken was about to get caught in a sex scandal. There was a link to an online message board where someone calling himself Sam Spade was claiming that Franken had “groped” his aunt on a New York City subway in the nineteen-seventies. (Asked about this, Franken joked, “Ah, yes, Aunt Gertrude—I remember her well.”) Archives show that “Sam Spade” separately posted a message saying that he “hoped Al Franken would die a slow painful death.”
At 1 a.m. on November 16th, Roger Stone, the notorious right-wing operative, announced, on Twitter, “It’s Al Franken’s ‘time in the barrel.’ Franken next in long list of Democrats to be accused of ‘grabby’ behavior.” After Tweeden’s story was posted, Alex Jones, the extremist radio host, boasted on his show that Stone had told him, in advance, “Get ready. Franken’s next.” Stone told me that an executive at Fox who was friendly with Tweeden had tipped him off.
Sean Hannity exulted when the news broke. Tweeden called in to his radio show live, and Hannity described her as “a longtime friend.” Hannity, who, when Ailes died, celebrated him as one of America’s “great patriotic warriors,” pronounced the Franken photograph “disgusting”—and declared that Franken had been accused of “sexual molestation.” Trump joined the fray on Twitter, insinuating that the photograph documented an assault in progress: “Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6?”
Twelve minutes after KABC-AM went on the air with the news, Franken’s office got its first press inquiry, and hundreds soon followed. Shelleby, the deputy chief of staff, recalls, “It was bedlam. No one looked into the details. There was no way to catch up.”
Franken tried to devise a response, but, he told me, he found it “impossible to explain the context of the goofing around everybody had been doing, so I just said, ‘It was a joke—it wasn’t funny, and I apologize.’ ” His statement was lambasted on social media as hopelessly inadequate. He released a longer, more self-critical apology. But, he told me, “I was in shock, and I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have.” He went on, “You feel very trapped. And the press was just reporting it as she said it.”
...
==
619 mma
...HANNITY (HOST): I watch that nine and a half minute press conference and well, God bless our media mob, conspiracy theorists, liars and hoaxers.
...
And I thought it was a great embarrassment to Robert Mueller -- and I will be honest, as I watched him, I got the feeling, watching that, he had neither read the statement, was stumbling over the statement, or didn't remember what he had said.
Previously:
==
‘Unbelievable’: Paul Manafort’s texts with Sean Hannity revealed in court filing
Texts between former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort and Fox News host Sean Hannity were released on Friday as a court filing entered in Manafort’s sentencing. Manafort is currently in…
basically go between manafort and trump to get pardon?! we have text msg b/c he and his lawyer were violating gag order to keep from skewing witness pool (so they just used hannity to do it for them)
mma
Saturday, there was another mass shooting at a synagogue. A man opened fire inside the Chabad synagogue in Powoy, CA, just outside of San Diego. NBC's Ben Collins and Andrew Blankstein reported that an open letter was posted on far-right forum 8chan in the shooters name, which also took credit for an unsolved arson of a nearby mosque. According to the San Diego County Sheriff, the alleged shooter is now being investigated for that arson as well.
Over at Bellingcat, Robert Evans took a deep dive into 8chan, which was also the place where the Christchurch mosque shooter posted his manifesto. Media Matters' Cristina López has previously written about how board users launch harassment campaigns using 8chan. 8chan is also the hub of the QAnon conspiracy theory which has swept pro-Trump media; a number of prominent right-wing figures have amplified that conspiracy theory.And board users absolutely love Sean Hannity.
Over at The New York Times, Charlie Warzel wrote about how these mass shootings have become a meme in the far-right internet: "The pattern is eerie: it starts with a crude genealogy of the shooter’s ethnic roots, then a self-aggrandizing Q. and A. with himself, followed by a litany of toxic in-jokes meant to confuse the media and those less savvy in far-right online culture. ... Like the Christchurch massacre, the Poway shooting is not only tailored for the internet but also sickeningly standardized. The digital footprint and manifestoes of these white nationalist terrorists follow a familiar template — one that each shooter fills in with their own hideous details. Indeed, it seems real-world murderous hate crimes have become a message board meme of sorts. And like any online meme, the creation cycle only seems to be accelerating, refining itself and, horrifyingly, increasing in frequency."
On Fox News, a guest was linking the rise of anti-Semitism to Trump's permissive rhetoric about the far right, specifically Trump's defense of white nationalists in Charlottesville who chanted "Jews will not replace us." (Trump even doubled down on that characterization on Friday in an interview with Mark Levin.) But as the guest described this, the show suddenly cut to commercial. The guest was invited back on later in the day, but the discussion moved quickly beyond Trump's rhetoric to an assertion that Trump could not possibly be personally anti-Semitic.
Fox News never stopped pushing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that motivated the Tree of Life shooter. Glenn Beck was on Fox News earlier this month pushing it. And earlier this week, a Fox Nation guest fearmongered about George Soros infiltrating the census, harkening back to when a guest was banned from the network for complaining about the "Soros-occupied State Department."
==
==
mma
Fox News spent weeks in May 2017 spreading the conspiracy theories trying to link murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich to WikiLeaks.From Sean Hannity to Newt Gingrich to Steve Doocy, the objective was clear: If there were any possibility that Rich was the source of the emails, then it would not have been Russia. And if it were not Russia, Trump would be cleared of any malfeasance. But now, thanks to Robert Mueller's final report, we finally have proof that it was all a lie.
In 2017, following Rich's murder, right-wing conspiracy theories arose, asserting that the staffer had provided DNC emails to Wikileaks for publication. There was never a shred of evidence to support this conspiracy theory. No responsible news organization ran with anything close to this. But Fox News did.
This was a transparent attempt to protect Trump from the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid his campaign. After running with the story for days amidst criticism, Fox finally pulled the initial report. Hannity then continued pushing it, stopping only when Rich's family asked him to. Fox News eventually promised an internal investigation into the matter -- and this week marked 700 days since that promise. And still, we've heard nothing.
There is no reason to believe that anyone at Fox will be held accountable for their actions. Fox has never cared about the basic ethical standards accepted at most newsrooms. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz explained, "Fox is a propaganda outlet geared toward ensuring the continued dominance of Trump and his movement. The pain of Rich’s family is simply the cost of doing business."
==
mma
Before perpetrating what’s believed to have been the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter posted online,blaming Jewish people in the U.S. “for bringing in an invasion of nonwhite immigrants.” He was specifically referring to the caravans of migrants from Central America that conservative media have focused on as an existential threat to the United States.
The link between conservative media rhetoric and the shooter's words was readily apparent at the time. But instead of course correcting following the massacre, Fox is instead still pushing the conspiracy theory to this day.
Sean Hannity hosted conspiracy theory-monger Glenn Beck, who said the migrant caravans were “directly” funded by “George Sorosand others” (Soros is Jewish). Beck further claimed that "American communists in Chicago" are orchestrating the caravans with money from Soros.
The New Republic's Jeet Heer noted thatBeck's words were "a straight up articulation of the theory of Judeo–Bolshevism, the ideological pillar of Nazi anti-Semitism." Many others noticed that Beck's words were indistinguishable from those of the Tree of Life shooter.
(While shocking, this was entirely foreseeable for Fox News: Beck made his name at the network in part through anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros.)
It was not just on Hannity, either. On the same night, Lou Dobbs blamed "left-wing money" and "the United Nations" for migrants headed to the border. This is a clear dog whistle for Dobbs' audience, as the Fox Business host, his guests, and others on the network have repeatedly pushed the same conspiracy theory. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a Dobbs guest was bannedfrom the network after a previously aired show reran in which the guest complained about the "Soros-occupied State Department." Fox has taken no action regarding Beck or Dobbs this week.
mma
A new Navigator Research poll reports that "the Fox News echo-chamber"has created "an alternative reality in American politics," with Republicans who watch Fox News a few times a month or more showing significantly more radical views than those who don't watch the network.
79% of GOP Fox viewers say that "people within the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to sabotage President Trump." That's compared to 49% of Republicans who don't watch Fox, 24% of non-Republicans who watch Fox, and 8% of non-Republicans who don't watch Fox.
That's an astonishing divide between Republicans who watch Fox and the rest of the public on the question of whether or not Trump is the victim of a massive "deep state" conspiracy to remove him from office.
Fox has been feeding this conspiracy to its audience for years. Sean Hannity has led the charge, but many of his colleagues have adopted the same rhetoric.
As the Mueller investigation moves toward its conclusion, the overwhelming support among Fox viewers for the idea that the president is being sabotaged by the FBI and intelligence agencies is seriously concerning. The Fox-GOP infrastructure is already priming the pump for another investigation into the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton's email server.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/fox-news-could-being-trumps-personal-propaganda-network-and-hannity-is-losing-it-report/
Fox News has served as a full-blown propaganda network for President Donald Trump for the first two years of his presidency, but a revolt within the network’s news department is spurring talk of change.
*Vanity Fair’s* Gabriel Sherman reports that Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Fox-owning media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is not a big Trump fan and is wary of having his network seen as the president’s personal Soviet-style Pravda.
Although the editorial changes that Murdoch is considering making aren’t expected to be too drastic — the network will continue to be a right-wing news network — they’re reportedly still enough to scare Fox News host Sean Hannity into believing it will hurt Trump politically.
“Hannity told Trump last year that the Murdochs hate Trump, and Hannity is the only one holding Fox together,” one source tells Sherman.
Additionally, some sources within Fox believe that the Murdochs will try to create some distance between Fox News and the president as part of a larger strategy to sell the network off to another buyer.
“Everyone thinks they’re going to sell it,” one Fox News anchor tells Sherman. “It’s too small to be independent.”
==
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3/19
- Sean Hannity even said that parents are in hospitals killing babies in gladiator-style entertainment. Needless to say, that is not happening.
- Death panels are back! The previous lie of the year about the Affordable Care Act has returned, with Fox host Mark Levin suggestingthat "Medicare-for-all" will lead to senior citizens being murdered.
- A Fox contributor is arguing that "Medicare-for-all" would be communists
random grab 918 mma
Sean Hannity: "Secret Service now must do everything within their power" to find anonymous op-ed author
Video September 7, 2018 10:19 PM EDT
Sean Hannity calls for "the guy that appointed Mueller," Deputy AG Rosenstein, to be "investigated and prosecuted"
Video September 7, 2018 9:53 PM EDT
Tucker Carlson attacks American diversity
Video September 7, 2018 9:29 PM EDT
Sean Hannity falsely claims George Papadopolous wasn't part of Trump campaign following his sentencing
Video September 7, 2018 6:05 PM EDT
Abortion opponents were reassured by Kavanaugh's comments on Roe v. Wade
Blog September 7, 2018 5:36 PM EDT
Sean Hannity claims the Beto O'Rourke campaign asked for volunteers to transport undocumented immigrants to polling booths. It didn't happen.
Video September 7, 2018 4:45 PM EDT
Fox News host Sean Hannity published an op-ed on Wednesday laying out exactly how he thought President Donald Trump, to whom he serves as an informal adviser, should move forward…
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-ceo-bizarrely-rejects-ad-for-anti-nazi-documentary-not-appropriate-for-our-air/
hannity
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January 25th, the FBI arrested Roger Stone and executed search warrants of his residences in Florida and New York. Stone was charged on seven counts of obstruction, giving false statements, and witness tampering as part of the special counsel's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Fox News immediately worked to minimize the importance of Stone's indictment.
The network utilized three forms of defense for Trump's longtime adviser:
- Declare the indictments reveal nothing and assert that there's no evidence of collusion.
- Criticize the manner in which Stone was arrested. As Chris Hayes, Elliot Williams, and others pointed out, Fox News suddenly cared about potential civil rights violations and a growing police state only when Roger Stone was arrested.
- Deflecting by bringing up other officials, like Eric Holder, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and more.
As Matt Gertz wrote of the role that Fox News plays in the Russia probe,"Hannity has primed his audience to reject any conclusions from the Mueller investigation and to support Trump if he fires the special counsel or demands the Justice Department take action against his political foes. If Trump decides toundermine the rule of law by taking such steps, he will have the fervent support of the Fox Host and his viewers."
And we know that Trump was watching the coverage on Fox. Speaking of that, Trump told Face The Nation in an interview airing today, "You have to get rid of the Russia witch hunt."
Also:Jerome Corsi said in an interview this week that Stone is "pressuring me to change my testimony." Meanwhile, Stone's explanation for his witness tampering charge was that he was trying to help Randy Credico.
Finally: Stone during the campaign repeatedly bragged about talking with Trump and senior campaign officials.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/fox-news-sean-hannity-appears-to-have-acted-on-directives-from-newly-revealed-stone-wikileaks-emails/
no lnx
Fox News host Sean Hannity appears to have acted on directives from emails between President Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone and an intermediary who claimed to have communicated with WikiLeaks.
On Twitter, author Kurt Eichenwald points out that, among the details in the indictment of Stone, is a passage about WikiLeaks’ plan to leak emails suggesting Hillary Clinton was seriously ill and Sean Hannity’s focus on Clinton’s health in the following days.
“Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke, neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus,” Stone’s link to WikiLeaks told him via email on August 2, 2016.
Also in the email, Stone’s link to WikiLeaks told him that Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange was planning a document dump in October.
A few days after the email was sent to Stone, Fox News host Sean Hannity began to focus on Hillary’s health, suggesting that she was having “seizures” and had some sort of neurological problem.
Specifically, Hannity focused on a short video clip where Clinton bobbed her head as someone stuck a microphone in her face.
[vid?]
“Are there many seizures like that?” Hannity said on the air. “This looks like violent, out of control movements on her part.”
Eichenwald thus argues that Hannity may have had strategy information that originated with WikiLeaks and should no longer be on the air with Fox.
Read his thoughts below.
Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
- As I continue to research the spread of info described in the Stone indictment, it has become clear that @FoxNews needs to explain what role @seanhannity - Cohen's mystery client - had to do with the Russian conspiracy. And why the hell he is still on the air. The key date...
3,234
1:49 PM - Jan 25, 2019
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Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
- Jan 25, 2019
- As I continue to research the spread of info described in the Stone indictment, it has become clear that @FoxNews needs to explain what role @seanhannity - Cohen's mystery client - had to do with the Russian conspiracy. And why the hell he is still on the air. The key date...
Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
2...is August 2, 2016, when Corsi sent an email to Stone. In that email, Corsi says that Assange is planning a document dump on October 2 to cause the most damage possible. (Do you Wikileaks fans FINALLY understand what this fraud is?) In preparation of that, Corsi says that....
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1:51 PM - Jan 25, 2019
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Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
- Jan 25, 2019
Replying to @kurteichenwald and 2 others
2...is August 2, 2016, when Corsi sent an email to Stone. In that email, Corsi says that Assange is planning a document dump on October 2 to cause the most damage possible. (Do you Wikileaks fans FINALLY understand what this fraud is?) In preparation of that, Corsi says that....
Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
3...'That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke – neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus..."We do not need any further evidence of collusion - THIS is it. These bastards are....
661
1:53 PM - Jan 25, 2019
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Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
- Jan 25, 2019
Replying to @kurteichenwald and 2 others
3...'That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke – neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus..." We do not need any further evidence of collusion - THIS is it. These bastards are....
Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
4...willing to undermine democracy with lies. Drudge picks it up in a few days. Then, EIGHT days after this conspiracy involving Corsi, Stone, Russian hackers, Assange, frigging @seanhannity jumps into the mix. Hillary makes a goofy head movement when someone shoves a mike in....
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1:55 PM - Jan 25, 2019
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Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
- Jan 25, 2019
Replying to @kurteichenwald and 2 others
4...willing to undermine democracy with lies. Drudge picks it up in a few days. Then, EIGHT days after this conspiracy involving Corsi, Stone, Russian hackers, Assange, frigging @seanhannity jumps into the mix. Hillary makes a goofy head movement when someone shoves a mike in....
Kurt Eichenwald
?
@kurteichenwald
5...her face. (A mic, not a mike) No one looking at that could see it as anything but what it was - physical humor. But, building on Drudge's "she needs to be helped up the stairs" lie, @seanhannity jumps all over this stupid movement to proclaim - JUST LIKE CORSI URGED -...
555
1:57 PM - Jan 25, 2019
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Kurt Eichenwald
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@kurteichenwald
- Jan 25, 2019
Replying to @kurteichenwald and 2 others
5...her face. (A mic, not a mike) No one looking at that could see it as anything but what it was - physical humor. But, building on Drudge's "she needs to be helped up the stairs" lie, @seanhannity jumps all over this stupid movement to proclaim - JUST LIKE CORSI URGED -...
Kurt Eichenwald
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@kurteichenwald
6....That Hillary had a neurological problem. On August 10, eight days after the "lie about her health" email, Hannity says on her show after showing the goofy head movement, "“This looks like violent, out of control movements on her part.” He then goes on to say "seizures...
535
1:58 PM - Jan 25, 2019
==
Conservatives Throw a Temper Tantrum
The loudest outcry came from the right-wing shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama were "portraying standard, ordinary, everyday conservatives as posing a bigger threat to this country than al-Qaeda terrorists or genuine enemies of this country like Kim Jong-Il."Sean Hannitywarned his Fox News viewers that “if you have a pro-life bumper sticker on your car, if you have an 'America is overtaxed' bumper sticker, if you have a pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker, they're viewing you potentially as a radical.”
In possibly the most deranged interpretation, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote that the report was a “hit job on conservatives” and “one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real….the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”
In a sad sort of irony, Johnson told SPLC that the conservative media personalities who misinterpreted and attacked his report “would have been shocked to know that I personify conservatism. I'm an Eagle Scout. I'm a registered Republican. I'm Mormon. In fact, I was helping the Boy Scouts with a fundraiser when I heard the report being attacked on the news."
Outrage over the report's findings quickly spread to Congress, where several conservative lawmakers demanded the ouster of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Among them was Rep. John Carter, R-Tex., who remarked, "We shouldn't even give her the respect of letting her resign. She should be fired by the administration for accusing honest, American citizens — because of their political beliefs — of being domestic terrorists."
The self-described conservative and Christian non-profit Thomas More Law Center went even further and filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano on behalf a Michigan-based anti-abortion group, claiming the DHS report was all part of a conspiracy between the Obama administration and liberal groups to violate their constitutional rights.
The section of the report that stirred the most controversy referred to “disgruntled military veterans” and cautioned that “rightwing extremists would attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans to boost their violent capabilities.”
==
mma
Hannity is absolutely furious that Michelle Obama attacked Trump's birther lies.
On the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, Sean Hannity said he wasn’t going to campaign for Trump. His employer Fox News said he wasn’t going to campaign for Trump. And yet, that night, Hannity got up on the stage with Trump at the president’s final campaign rally of the election cycle and praised the administration for “promises made, promises kept.” He gestured to the journalists covering the event and called them “fake news.” Fellow Fox News host Jeanine Pirro soon followed him on stage to urge the crowd to vote Republican.
While Fox has halfheartedly disciplined Hannity in the past for his blatantly unethical conduct, the network seems to have finally dropped the charade. As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz explained, Hannity’s close ties to the White House and his role as a Trump confidant have apparently rendered him untouchable by the network.
In response to the backlash to Hannity’s appearance at the rally, an anonymous Fox spokesperson released the following statement: “FOX News does not condone any talent participating in campaign events. We have an extraordinary team of journalists helming our coverage tonight and we are extremely proud of their work. This was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.”
This is nonsense, of course. As Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki reported, regardless of what the network says it does or “does not condone,” more than a dozen Fox hosts and contributors raised funds for Republican Party organizations in the first year of Trump’s administration -- continuing a yearslong pattern.
==
Fox News Was Just Humiliated When Sean Hannity Spoke at a Trump Rally — Contradicting the Network's Promises
https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-proud-boys-claim-self-defense-when-defending-ring-wing-violence-total-joke
amanda m
When far-right groups like the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer get into street brawls, they have a go-to rationalization: It was self-defense. The argument is that fringe right-wingers are out there peacefully protesting or attending speeches, and that the violence that often seems to erupt afterward is merely a reaction to leftist provocation.
"Antifa terrorists attacked us, not the other way around," argues a typical post at the Proud Boys Facebook page, after members of the group were filmed beating up anti-fascist protesters after Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes gave a speech at New York's Metropolitan Republican Club.
Conservative media has picked up this talking point and has aggressively defended and promoted far-right groups — who have also gotten into street fights in Portland, Oregon, and Providence, Rhode Island, in the past month — painting them as victims who only engage in violence as a last resort to defend themselves.
On her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham interviewed Joey Gibson, the head of Patriot Prayer, who denied "any intention to get violent" and said the violence in Portland was purely self-defense.
Sean Hannity, on his own Fox News show, put the blame on for these outbreaks of violence on Democratic rhetoric he considers rude, even though none of the figures or incidents he mentioned were anywhere near these events. He explained what happened last week this way: "A bunch of anarchists go to the New York GOP club, Republican club, whatever it happens to be, and they’recommitting vandalism, anarchist signs that they’re putting up, etc., and then there’s a confrontation on the street there."
...
==
Twelve Russian military officers were indicted for hacking into Democrats' computers and disseminating the stolen information to disrupt the 2016 election. The indictment also has references of Infowars host and a then-Breitbart columnist.
But perhaps the most immediately notable part of the indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe is that it directly rebuts the long-simmering right-wing media conspiracy theory about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. While the indictment alleges that Russians were behind the hacking (something that intelligence had reportedly concluded long ago), right-wing media have for years -- without any evidence -- pressed the idea that it was actually Rich who did it.
Sean Hannity became the ringleader of this effort, relentlessly dedicating his show in May 2016 to the conspiracy theory until pressure from dropped advertisers forced him to stop covering it, even though he promised he was "closer to the TRUTH than ever." Neither Fox News nor Hannity have ever apologized or even explained their botched reports.
Now that the office of special counsel Robert Mueller has laid out the actual facts (that Russian hacking came very shortly after then-candidate Donald Trump publicly asked for their assistance), it's time for Hannity to come clean.
But we all know he won't. And neither will Fox News. Newt Gingrich has already refused to apologize. And that's why it's more important than ever for people like you to take action and force Hannity's hand.
That's the only thing that works.
Also: An Infowars host reacted to news of the indictments by screaming out "Thank you Russia." Fox host Lou Dobbs downplayed them, saying they were just based on hearsay. And Hannity said that the indictments were suspicious because of the timing; Hannity, while absurdly and bizarrely claiming that we still don't know who leaked the emails, said that it could be any other country.
==
Fox News is reportedly having trouble selling ads for Sean Hannity's and Laura Ingraham's shows. One Fox News staffer told Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman that "The pro-Trump thing isn't working. We can't monetize DACA and the wall and that right-wing shit."
This follows an October 2017 report that Fox News' ad revenue had dropped 17 percent, while revenue for its competitors had remained virtually unchanged.
The toxic conspiracy theories, the pro-Trump propaganda, the racism and sexism and bigotry, and the extreme measures to defend anything that comes out of the White House (including conspiracy theories, racism, sexism, and bigotry) make Fox News unsafe for most advertisers. And whether it's Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham's show, the core issue is that Fox News management, from the Murdochs on down, is not interested in fixing the problem.
Also: Once again, Fox News anchor Shep Smith has debunked a pro-Trump lie spread by Hannity. This same thing keeps happening.
==
escalator
https://www.gq.com/story/spygate-conspiracy-theory-explained
escalator
no many lnx
Spygate: How Right-Wing Media Creates a Conspiracy Theory Out of Thin Air
BY JAY WILLIS
This is how conservative media transformed a small news item into a full-blown conspiracy theory that the president (apparently) believes to be true.
The plot goes like this: During the summer of 2016, on the clandestine orders of then-president Barack Obama, the FBI and CIA hatched an ambitious plan to topple the Trump campaign from the inside. In a scandal of unprecedented scope, Democratic politicians commandeered American counterintelligence resources to spy on their primary political opponent and boost Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the election. The Russia investigation that has dominated headlines for nearly two years is, in fact, a desperate smokescreen conjured up by terrified Deep State actors to conceal evidence of their own wrongdoing, and to frame the president for heinous crimes he didn't commit.
On May 8, The Washington Post reported on the White House's decision to back the Justice Department's withholding of information from House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, on the grounds that disclosure would expose the identity of "a U.S. citizen who has provided information to the FBI and CIA." The authors added, though, that the individual had been a source of information used by the special counsel's office—and that it was unclear whether Trump knew this "key fact" when his administration chose to side with law enforcement.
It didn't take long for him to find out. Almost immediately, the right-wing-media ecosystem began laundering and repackaging this news item, weaving its constituent elements together with Trumpian talking points until a full-blown conspiracy theory worthy of the president's tweets emerged on the other side. This metamorphosis is what would happen if a word cloud sourced from a Trump rally were used in a giant game of telephone—but one in which the gibberish end result were then broadcast as news to hundreds of millions of recipients.
How did this happen?
May 10
Two days after the initial report, citing "the Washington Post's unnamed law-enforcement leakers," The Wall Street Journal publishes an analysis by conservative commentator Kim Strassel. "[W]e might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign." Such a development, she writes, "would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting." Strassel continues (all emphasis mine):
[W]hen precisely was this human source operating? Because if it was prior to that infamous Papadopoulos tip, then the FBI isn’t being straight. It would mean the bureau was spying on the Trump campaign prior to that moment. And that in turn would mean that the FBI had been spurred to act on the basis of something other than a junior campaign aide’s loose lips.
This is at once cautious and bold, introducing the salacious vocabulary of espionage to a detail about an intelligence source—but only, she clarifies, if the allegations are true. Strassel does not offer a reason for entertaining her hypothetical, other than her characterization of the players' accounts of the investigation as "suspiciously vague."She is, in the classic style of well-compensated public intellectuals filling up column inches, just asking questions.
That night, other journalists are happy to offer answers. On Sean Hannity's Fox News show, journalist Sara Carter, citing Strassel,tells listeners of “concern that the FBI actually had a spy within the Trump campaign.” Hannity is dumbfounded: “What? What?” he splutters. "Yes," replies Carter. Blogs like Gateway Pundit kick off the breathless hyperbole category. "Now we know why the Deep State has been working so hard to take down President Trump and the republic," said the post, linking to and block-quoting Strassel. "OBAMA DEEP STATE HAD A SPY INSIDE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN!"
May 11
The baton is passed to Fox News, which syndicates Strassel's article and changes the headline from “About that FBI ‘source’” to “Did the FBI place a mole inside the 2016 Trump campaign?” On Fox & Friends, the president's morning program of choice, Pete Hegseth weighs in, hesitantly at first. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign? Just asking the question. There’s an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about it." Ainsley Earhardt quotes at length from the column before positing that it means the FBI and DOJ had someone "paid to go and spy on President Trump."
On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picks up the thread, encouraging the conflation of the FBI and President Obama. Strassel's article mentions Obama only once, and only in passing. But this is Rush Limbaugh, not a major newspaper; he can say things like this without fear of repercussions.
When I say “the FBI,” I mean the Obama administration. They infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy, and while they had that spy implanted, they were unmasking and leaking and obtaining FISA spying warrants and conducting criminal investigations of Trump advisers. This is a big deal...For our purposes, folks, the important thing is that the Obama administration infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy.
The buzz grows louder online. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign?"asks Andrew McCarthy, praising Strassel's column as "essential reporting," in a National Review article that published early the next morning.Right-wing blog ZeroHedge makes an affirmative statement—“WSJ: The FBI Hid a Mole in the Trump Campaign”—out of his question. Also citing Strassel, Tucker Carlson refers to a "government spy" and a "mole" sent by "the Obama administration." His guest, NRATV personality Dan Bongino, reveals that he believes there to have been more than one spy, referring to "reporting." He does not elaborate on-air.
May 14
The week begins with lawmakers joining the fray. On Fox & Friends, GOP congressman Ron DeSantis calls for a follow-up investigation into the matter. "I know that we’re actively trying to get the underlying documents that would tell us: Did they spy on the Trump campaign or not?” he asks, implicitly treating the premises of that query as if they were beyond dispute. To Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Network, Matt Gaetz expresses unease with "reports" he'd heard "about potential human intelligence being collected on a rival presidential campaign."
These men are egged on by, among others, Rush Limbaugh,who asserts he knows the identity of the spy that the FBI "put in the Trump campaign," and Hannity, whose radio guest David Limbaugh—Rush's younger brother—opines that "an official policy inserting a confidential source into a presidential campaign" would be "unprecedented" and "worse than Watergate." Like DeSantis, he includes a soft qualifier, though: "If it happened! We have to get to the bottom of it."
May 15
Nunes appears on the Fox & Friends set, hinting that the campaign might have been "set up" by the FBI. “I believe they never should have opened a counterintelligence investigation into a political party,” he explains. And although he at first avoids using the word "spy," his hosts are happy to put it in his mouth. Steve Doocy suggests that Nunes's narrative implies that Trump was "framed," while Earhardt adds that "it makes it sound like there was a spy."
Some 12 hours later, Hannity is again agape at the "possibility of an FBI mole that was inside the Trump campaign." He runs snippets of the "stunning" Nunes interview, scarcely able to believe his ears. "The powerful tools of intelligence used to spy on an opposition party candidate, and those powerful tools used against Americans?" he muses. "No, that can't happen here."
May 16
On Laura Ingraham's show, Rudy Giuliani at once broaches the subject of the FBI "possibly placing a spy in the Trump campaign" while admitting that he doesn't know if the gossip is true. The next morning, on Fox & Friends, he’ll again dip his toes in the water before retreating to solid ground. "That would be the biggest scandal in the history of this town—at least, involving law enforcement," Giuliani warns.
He's intrigued by the possibility, though. "Maybe two spies!" he wonders aloud.
Meanwhile, outside the MAGAsphere, a New York Times article helps breathe new life into the conspiracy theory. The authors of that report—an account of the 2016 law-enforcement inquiry into the Trump campaign—note that “at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos.” Referring to the preceding week of innuendo, they characterize this detail as a “politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.”
As noted by USA Today's Brad Heath, FBI guidelines allow agents to use informants, among many other methods of information-gathering, when assessing whether a matter warrants a full criminal investigation. The Bureau's partial reliance on a "source" here isn't especially remarkable.
Furthermore, given their knowledge of the Kremlin's election-meddling efforts, it isn't difficult to understand why the intelligence community might have an interest in a campaign's ties to Russia, regardless of the candidate's political affiliation. Marco Rubio—a man not known for being fond of Hillary Clinton—said as much after reviewing the underlying evidence along with the rest of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found no secret political motivation for opening the inquiry. “There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he reasoned in comments cited by the Times. “That’s what they did.”
It doesn't matter. One little opening is all it takes. Breitbart, mentioning the May 8 Post story and Strassel's follow-up, proclaims that the Times report "confirmed" that the FBI ran a "spy operation on the Trump campaign that involved government informants, secret subpoenas, and possible wiretaps." (The article itself mentions only the FISA warrant on Page, but the headline'splural form—"wiretaps"—does its job of making things sound especially ominous.)
May 17
Other right-wing outlets aggregating the Timesreport draw the same conclusions Breitbart did. “FBI officials admit they spied on the Trump campaign,” blares The Federalist, which justifies its assertion with a helpful explanatory aside.
This paragraph [in the Times report] is noteworthy for the way it describes spying on the campaign—“at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos”—before suggesting that might not be spying. The definition of spying is to secretly collect information, so it’s not really in dispute whether a government informant fits the bill.”
Note that the write-up does not actually suggest that the FBI "planted" anyone in the campaign. But by setting out an expansive definition of "spying," articles like this one allow other publications—ones that might not so carefully define their terms—to use the word in that more specific (and more nefarious) context.
It is the National Review's coverage—assisted by cable news—that finally allows this story to reach the hallways of the Executive Residence."With the blessing of the Obama White House," writes Andrew McCarthy, again attributing the actions of law-enforcement officials to affirmative decisions of the then-president, the FBI "took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans—Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries."He continues:
Obviously, Russia was trying to meddle in the election, mainly through cyber-espionage—hacking. There would, then, have been nothing inappropriate about the FBI’s opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible not to do so. That’s what counterintelligence powers are for.
But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.
This is the thrust of his argument, and it is nonsensical. McCarthy seems to assume that counterintelligence investigations "against Russia" and counterintelligence investigations "against the Trump campaign" must be mutually exclusive propositions, and that under no circumstances could a Russia-related intelligence probe look at the activities of Russia-related Trump officials. (His analysis is aided by a gross oversimplification of a key provision of FISA.) It would be "irresponsible," he urges, not to investigate what Russia may have been doing. But by virtue of their affiliation with a politician, everyone on the campaign should be insulated from any attendant scrutiny.
Before his column publishes, McCarthy hops on Fox & Friends to promote it. “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign,” he says in a strange moment of confidence and timidity. (In a fun, incestuous right-wing-media aside, while listing McCarthy's credentials, F&F co-host Brian Kilmeade adds, "Hopefully a Fox News contributor soon.") Not long afterward, Trump takes to Twitter to express his outrage, shouting out McCarthy by name for a job well done.
Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.” Andrew McCarthy says, “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.” If so, this is bigger than Watergate!
...
Law-enforcement pushback begins in earnest.Sources tell CNN that, no, the source was not placed within the Trump campaign. The Times provides even more details about the timeline, affirming that the informant spoke to campaign members only after the FBI learned of their dubious contacts with Russia. "No evidence has emerged," it reiterates, "that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal."
It's too late. Because Donald Trump is president of the United States, the content of his tweets becomes breaking news regardless of its accuracy. "Trump: Justice Department planted spy in 2016 campaign," declares an AP headline that runs, among other places, in The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. The body text notes that Trump's "own lawyer" has said that the allegation "might not be true."But for readers inclined to believe what Donald Trump says, or for those who only saw the headline as they scrolled through their social feeds, it might as well have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Epilogue: May 18–20
The next day, the president tweets again, and again, with grateful acknowledgements for the hard work put in by Fox News personalities Lou Dobbs, David Asman, and Gregg Jarrett.
==
While Fox & Friends may be Trump's favorite show, Trump's close relationship with Sean Hannity is unparalleled. Hannity and Trump speak before bedtime, and Hannity has been called Trump's unofficial chief of staff. Trump also encourages people to watch Hannity's show. Matt Gertz reviewed everything that Sean Hannity said about Robert Mueller's probe for a year, and found that Hannity has been laying the groundworkfor Trump to use any means necessary to stop the investigation.
Also: There is a small, recurring cast of characters that is primarily seen on Hannity, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and Justice with Jeanine Pirro. These are the people who are telling Trump to act on his authoritarian impulses, and who are normalizing extreme, authoritarian actions within Trump's base before Trump does anything.
What Fox News doesn't tell its viewers: Getting no mention on Hannity or elsewhere on Fox News was a report that Saudi and Emirati princes offered assistance to the Trump campaign. Erik Prince (Blackwater founder and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) and George Nader, emissary for the princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were both present at an August 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. Following this meeting, Nader became close with members of the Trump campaign and had multiple meetings with Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn.
https://www.alternet.org/how-right-wing-media-help-trump-spin-lies-about-russia-investigation
2 mtgs gang 8
... crucial to view this attempt by the White House to assert the existence of an anti-Trump cabal within the government in context: It's the latest in a series of fraudulent and debunked attemps to push such a claim. Trump’s demand that his investigators be investigated rests on a foundation of lies that was built with the critical assistance of a credulous and complicit right-wing media.
Let’s run through all the major conspiracy theories that brought us to this point.
Wiretapping
The effort by Trump and his defenders to deflect attention from the Russia investigation onto the previous administration started with this early-morning tweet from March 2017:
Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
It was a deathly serious allegation for the president to make, and it was completely false. Top Justice Department officials denied the allegation, a DOJ court filing affirmed that there are “no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets,” and the president has not produced any evidence to back up his accusation.
Unmasking
Nonetheless, Trump’s defenders in the conservative media contorted themselves to try to prove Trump was right, especially following House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes’ March 22, 2017, press conference (which Nunes secretly coordinated with the White House) announcing that “surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.”
Speaking of Nunes, he became the driving force behind the allegation that Obama administration officials had improperly unmasked the identities of Trump associates whose conversations were incidentally captured by intelligence agencies. Once again acting on information provided by the Trump White House, Nunes accused former national security adviser Susan Rice and other Obama officials of abusing the unmasking process. Rice acknowledged that she had requested certain identities, but congressional investigators from both parties saidshe’d done nothing wrong.
The “unmasking” nonsense permeated conservative media and was presented as evidence of an Obama-led conspiracy to undermine Trump as president-elect. Trump himself told The New York Times that he believed Rice had committed a crime.
“Secret society”
This was an especially stupid fiasco kicked up by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX). The pair went on Fox News to reveal the existence of a text message exchange between two FBI agents sent the day after the 2016 election that referenced a “secret society” supposedly populated by anti-Trump law enforcement officials. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, seized on the message to allege “corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.” Conservative media went absolutely crazy with the “secret society” allegation, holding it up as proof of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump.
The “secret society” turned out to be nothing more than an inside joke between the two agents.
:{
Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing”}:
The White House’s deflection strategy rests on the idea that Barack Obama corrupted law enforcement agencies by directing them to investigate Donald Trump’s campaign as a way of undermining his candidacy. To that end, Republicans and conservatives are invested in demonstrating that Obama actively meddled in politically sensitive law enforcement business, such as the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
In February, Johnson’s committee released a report alleging that a text message from an FBI agent stating that Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing” raised “questions about the type and extent of President Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email scandal and the FBI investigation of it.”
Once again, conservative media was driven to a frenzy, fueled partially by Trump’s tweet that the “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” And, once again, it all turned out to be false -- the text in question referred to presidential briefing materials regarding the investigation into Russian election interference, not Clinton.
FBI hid info from the FISA court
In February, Nunes’ committee released a memo that, according to the frantic hype that preceded its release, would reveal rampant surveillance abuses committed by intelligence agencies against the Trump campaign. Chief among the alleged abuses was the accusation that the FBI had illicitly obtained a warrant to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page by concealing from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court the political origin of some of the evidence it cited in its application.
Right-wing media figures like Sean Hannity
this “Watergate times a thousand” and said the FBI “lie[d] to a foreign intelligence surveillance court.” Trump tweeted that the memo “totally vindicates” him and showed the Russia investigation to be “an American disgrace.”
It was a lie -- the political origin of the evidence was indeed disclosed in the FBI application -- and Nunes and his Republican colleagues admitted as much in the days following the memo’s release.
What emerges from all this is a damning picture of a Republican political operation -- involving the White House and key members of Congress -- to concoct blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories, and a conservative media apparatus that readily absorbs and rebroadcasts that propaganda. At a certain level, behavior like this is to be expected -- these same characters spent all eight years of the Obama administration cobbling together ridiculous conspiracy theories about Benghazi, the former president’s birthplace, and a secret military invasion of Texas.
There is a key difference, however, in all the lying about the Russia investigation. These conspiracy theories are defensive. Most conservative pundits will describe the Russia investigation as a threat to the very fabric of American government; they recognize the extreme danger it poses to Trump’s presidency. Trump himself has no discernible legal strategy. Instead, he’s fighting a public relations campaign and casting himself as the victim of a “witch hunt.”
These attacks on the legitimacy of the investigation are the only weapon they have against it. And as the investigation exposes Trump to more and more legal and political peril, the conspiratorial attacks on the Justice Department and the Obama administration become more strident. Trump used to be content to vent on Twitter about the Russia investigation, but now he’s using the weight of his office to give life to an evidence-free accusation of political persecution.
Trump relies on the conservative media’s unthinking support as he wages this increasingly unhinged campaign. He needs to hear the hosts of Fox & Friends chirp every morning about how each new phony “bombshell” about the Russia investigation vindicates him. He needs to chat with Sean Hannity every night before bedtime about how Robert Mueller is out to get him. But Trump is only going to get more frustrated as each increasingly elaborate falsehood fails to produce the desired outcome, and that means the coordinated lying and conspiracy-mongering are only going to get worse as the investigation moves forward.
==
==
5/18 under investigation?
https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-sean-hannity-and-donald-trumps-bromance-extends-them-chatting-bed-night-report
Every night the phone rings for Fox News host Sean Hannity from the White House. While the first lady is in her own bedroom down the hall of the executive residence, the bromance between the two men is glowing through the phone as they gush over the president’s latest coverage on the network.
A shocking expose in New York Magazine revealed Sunday the many sources that are intimately aware of the relationship the two men share and how it has crafted the communications strategy for the White House.
"White House staff are aware that the calls happen, thanks to the president entering a room and announcing, 'I just hung up with Hannity,' or referring to what Hannity said during their conversations, or even ringing Hannity up from his desk in their presence," the report outlined.
Early on in the Trump presidency, the morning was spent flipping from cable news shows like MSNBC's Morning Joe to CNN's New Day, which ultimately lead to rage tweeting and an entire day's plans thrown out onto the White House lawn.
“It got to the point that they were just like, ‘We need to get him off these channels and onto Fox & Friends or else we’re going to be chasing down this crazy-train bullshit from MSNBC and CNN all day,’” one former White House official told New York Magazine.
Thanks to former chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer, however, the team was able to move the president to Fox News. The result has been a happier and more blissfully benighted Trump less likely to ignite World War III after a Chris Cuomo quip. That's not to say that there aren't other problems.
“Sometimes on Fox, a lot of stories are embellished, and they don’t necessarily cover the big news stories of the day," explained the current White House official. "When they cover the smaller stories, if that gets the president riled up, then that becomes an issue. Whenever he tweets, all of us do a mad dash or mad scramble to find out as much information about that random topic as possible. We’re used to it in a lot of ways, so it’s part of our morning routine.”
To make matters worse, Trump doesn't trust anyone willing to work for him. Instead he flocks to his phone, begging for outsiders to confirm he's right. At the center of those on speed dial, however, is Hannity.
“Sean Hannity understands the basic issues of economic nationalism and ‘America First’ foreign policy at a deeper level than the august staff of Jonathan Chait and the f*ckin’ clowns at New York Magazine,” Bannon replied.“Generally, the feeling is that Sean is the leader of the outside kitchen cabinet,” another White House official told New York Magazine.
A White House official explained it as the influence of administration officials are essentially equal to Fox News.
Read more of the extensive details of the relationship at *New York Magazine*.
trump, dobbs, rudy
...
president gets his information from Fox, makes his decisions and tweets accordingly, repeating network talking points minutes after he has heard them, no matter how goofy. In turn, the personalities of Fox have become presidential advisers; former judge and Fox host Jeanine Pirro and attorney, conspiracy theorist and Fox regular Joe diGenova, who was on Trump’s legal team for about a week before conflicts of interest forced him out, remain on the president’s speed dial.
What’s more, Trump “cherishes” Lou Dobbs over at Fox Business, according to The Daily Beast, places him on speakerphone for meetings in the Oval Office and makes sure “he is involved in some of the administration’s more sensitive discussions.” And an insider tells The Washington Post that Foxsuperstar Sean Hannity is so omnipresent at the White House, “he basically has a desk in the place.”
Conversely, the president and his minions repeatedly go on Fox programs to bluster and dissemble. In the last week and a half, Trump himself has phoned into his favorite show “Fox and Friends” for a thirty-minute, Grandpa Simpsons-style rant – and threatens to do it again soon. And former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the latest addition to Trump’s squad of nerve-wracked legal eagles, has appeared on Fox almost as much as those commercials for catheters.
Ostensibly, Giuliani’s mission has been to defend his boss against the Stormy Daniels and Russia scandals, and whatever else may soon rear its head when it comes to Michael Cohen, money laundering and other alleged high crimes and misdemeanors. Yet his comments don’t seem to be helping the president’s cause; quite the contrary. This headline from The Onion says it all, “Mueller Poses As Fox News Host To Coax Rudy Giuliani Into Giving Him Testimony On Trump.”
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https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-and-white-house-created-massive-toxic-bubble-its-about-pop
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/sean-hannity-coordinating-white-house
no lnx
Every episode of Fox News’ Hannity follows a fairly basic formula these days: pugnacious cube-headed goon Sean Hannity serves up a monologue devoted almost entirely to the vituperative (and frequently incoherent) slander of President Donald Trump’s political adversaries, and then he lards out the hour with panel discussions featuring a small, rotating cast of like-minded Trump sycophants and the odd sacrificial liberal.
As Donald Trump’s many scandals have mushroomed, Hannity has been forced to get louder and crazier. Last night’s episode was an especially psychotic exercise in Hannity-brand demonization as he attempted to counterpunch former FBI Director James Comey, who is ramping up a book tour for his forthcoming memoir. You can watch Hannity’s monologue below, in which the host places Comey, the Clintons, and special counsel Robert Mueller as the heads of their respective “crime families.”
It’s insane, but it's what Sean Hannity does. What was interesting about last night’s show, however, was the tweet that President Trump posted at 8:48 p.m. EST, 12 minutes before Hannity started:
Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
Big show tonight on @seanhannity! 9:00 P.M. on @FoxNews
5:48 PM - Apr 11, 2018
51.5K
33.2K people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Big show! How would Trump know that last night’s Hannity would be a big show? Why would he want everyone to watch this specific episode of Hannity, which featured some of his favorite pundits calling for the heads of top Justice Department officials alongside an elaborate, acid-burned harangue against James Comey and Robert Mueller? What possible explanation could there be?
Well, the obvious and extremely satisfying one is that Trump knew it was coming and this was all one big coordinated attack on the credibility of the Russia investigation. That, at least, was the explanation put forth by well-sourced Trumpworld reporters. We know that Trump is in regular contact with his favorite Fox News hosts/propagandists (some of whom are old friends) and even solicits their input on policy matters. And given that Fox News is absolutely critical to the White House’s PR war against the Russia investigation, it’s not crazy to assume some level of coordination.
Hannity, however, is aghast and insulted that anyone would ever accuse him of such corruption.
Sean Hannity
?
@seanhannity
And the answer is “NO” to the Fake news industrial complex @ Potus was not given ANY heads up on my monologue using the “Comey” standard!!! Nice try. https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/984244920293699584 …
6:48 PM - Apr 11, 2018
3,871
“No collusion,” as it were. One should take a moment to note the specificity of Hannity’s denial -- Trump had no advance knowledge of the monologue. What about the rest of the show? If Trump had no idea what was coming, then why was he boosting the program before it aired?
Also, Hannity’s angry denials are not worth the flung spittle that accompanies them. He is so thoroughly compromised by his feral Trump advocacy that nothing he says can be taken at face value. Hannity has admitted to giving Trump advice on strategy and messaging in 2016 and described himself as “a little bit of a liaison” between the Trump campaign and Fox News. He has dinner with Trump frequently. Hannity has no core, no animating philosophy, and nothing of substance to say -- his job is to yell louder than the president's critics.
But Hannity would have us believe that he comes by his maniacal Trump boosterism honestly, that he is beyond official influence in his straight-shooting mission to cover the president as an infallible sun god molested by foul heretics and despicable blasphemers. So, I guess denying or admitting coordination doesn’t really matter because his end product is already functionally indistinct from official propaganda. Hannity’s either giving us the official White House line or the line the White House just happens to agree with entirely.
Simon Maloy is Salon's political writer
also politico
If you’re a regular listener of Glenn Beck’s radio show and you wanted to contribute to a political group that would advance the populist conservative ideals he touts on his show, you’d have plenty of reason to think that FreedomWorks was your best investment.
But if you’re a fan of Mark Levin’s radio show, you’d have just as much cause to believe that Americans for Prosperity, a FreedomWorks rival, was the most effective conservative advocacy group. And, if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity are who you listen to, you’d be hearing a steady stream of entreaties to support the important work of the Heritage Foundation.
“The point that people don’t realize,” said Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of the talk media trade publication TALKERS Magazine, “is that (big time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities – they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in – and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener.”That’s not coincidence. In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees buy them a variety of promotional tie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs – praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate – often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising.
The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s – and considers it money well spent.
“We approach it the way anyone approaches advertising: where is our audience that wants to buy what you sell?” Genevieve Wood, Heritage’s vice president for operations and marketing. “And their audiences obviously fit that model for us. They promote conservative ideas and that’s what we do.”
Last month, in the midst of a flurry of scrutiny of GOP presidential candidates’ stances on health insurance mandates similar to one included in the 2010 Democratic healthcare overhaul, Limbaugh took to the airwaves to defend Heritage’s past support for such a proposal.
“The Heritage Foundation to this day says they are being impugned and misrepresented in terms of their advocacy for such a thing,” Limbaugh said, explaining that the venerable think tank “abandoned the idea once they saw it implemented” and realized “it doesn’t work.”
Limbaugh, who has been a paid Heritage endorser since 2009, said the reversal did nothing to detract from the “profound … respect for Heritage. Heritage is the gold standard. Heritage was every bit as involved in Reaganism as Reagan was, and nothing’s changed.”
Levin, whose endorsement deal with the tea party organizing group Americans for Prosperity started last summer, was similarly protective of his sponsor last year after President Barack Obama singled out the group in making the case that anonymously funded attack ads were distorting the midterm elections.
“Americans for Prosperity is a magnificent organization that people join voluntarily. You. Me,” Levin said
. Obama, Levin continued, “wants you to hate Americans for Prosperity. So if he wants you to hate it, then you should embrace it, and promote it, and support it and join it, because it’s effective.”
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...Beck, lavishing praise on FreedomWorks’s new social network website this year, seemed to acknowledge the blurriness of the line between his show’s content and messages paid for by advertisers.
“This is a new thing from FreedomWorks and by the way, they are sponsor of this program and I have a commercial to do for them in, well, in just a few minutes. I don’t think they’re going to get one because this is pretty much it,” he said on his show, in a clip that’s posted on his personal website. “But it is something that I believe in, I’m not saying this because they’re paying me to do a commercial in a couple of minutes. This is something that I think is absolutely critical.”
To be sure, the hosts’ political perspectives dovetail with those of their endorsees and their paid sponsorships do not preclude them from discussing – or even praising – other groups.
And theintegration of sponsors and their causes into the content of conservative talkers’ shows is not unique to advocacy groups and think tanks, as Beck demonstrated in 2009 when he melded his frequent warnings of impending economic collapse with his promotion of gold, generally, and the precious metals retailer that sponsored his show, Goldline, specifically.
That prompted liberals – led by now-embattled Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner – to accuse Beck and, to a lesser extent, other conservative talk show hosts sponsored by gold retailers, of using misleading fear-mongering tactics “to cheat consumers.”
The increased willingness of non-profits to write big checks for such radio endorsements – which appears to have started in 2008, when Heritage paid $1.2 million to sponsor the talk shows hosted byHannity and Laura Ingraham – seems to be a primarily, if not entirely, a conservative phenomenon.
That’s perhaps attributable to the enduring power of talk radio on the right, as well as a newer development, the explosion of grassroots engagement by tea partiers and other newly mobilized Republican activists, which has spurred a competition for grass roots support – and contributions - among conservative groups.
Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new membershipsstarting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.
Americans for Prosperity wouldn’t divulge any details about its sponsorship of Levin, but board member Art Pope said the endorsement “makes AfP’s position on issues and policies more widely known and it also does attract grassroots activists or potential donors to AfP.”
The groups pay the companies that distribute the hosts’ shows, and not the hosts directly, for the endorsements.
While the deals differ, most provide the sponsoring group a certain number of messages or so called “live-reads,” in which the host will use a script, outline or set of talking points to deliver an advertisement touting the group and encouraging listeners to visit its website or contribute to it.
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https://www.alternet.org/media/fox-news-trump-fire-rosenstein
hannity
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Right-wing hosts like Sean Hannity get paid to pitch guns as a way to “survive a mass shooting”
Blog ››› October 6, 2017 11:40 AM EDT ››› ERIC HANANOKI
[vid]
Right-wing radio hosts such as Sean Hannity and Mark Levin have been acting as paid pitch people for a company that promises to help train members on how to use guns to “survive a mass shooting.” Hannity has been especially vocal about the company and used the recent Las Vegas mass shooting to shill for it on his radio program.
The U.S. Concealed Carry Association (USCCA) is a pro-gun company that sells membership plans featuring“education, training, and self-defense insurance” for gun owners. It also criticizes attempts to enact gun control laws and publishes Concealed Carry Magazine. The group claims to have over 250,000 members and has attempted to grow its membership over the years through numerous advertising buys with conservative media.
Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Ben Shapiro are all part of the association’s latest advertising campaign for a “100% FREE Complete Concealed Carry & Family Defense Guide,” which includes tips on “how to survive a mass shooting” and “the safest AND most dangerous places to sit in a restaurant” (the sign-up takes people to a page that urges them to pay for a membership).
The USCCA created dedicated landing pages for each individual host participating in the advertising campaign, including the following identical quote which was cut and pasted for each person:
Prior to the Las Vegas shooting, these media personalities did advertisements for the campaign that aired in late September. Here are those ads, along with their dedicated website URL: ?Beck (ProtectAndDefend.com), ?Hannity (DefendFamily.com), ?Levin (DefendThem.com), and ?Shapiro (DefendMyFamilyNow.com) .
Hannity has continued to tout USCCA as a solution to surviving a mass shooting following the Las Vegas tragedy. During his October 5 radio program, Hannity segued from talking about the mass shooting to introducing “our friends at the United States Concealed Carry Association,” saying, “I’m proud to be associated with them. They have offered a family defense guide. You’re going to learn -- and this is 164 pages -- how to survive a mass shooting. How to detect attackers before they see you.”
Previously, Hannity used the shooting at a congressional baseball practice in June to push USCCA membership.
The association, which did not respond to requests for comment, features a Hannity testimonial on its websiteunder the headline: “Why Sean Hannity Joined The USCCA… Hear Why One Of The Most Trusted Conservative Voices In America Is A Proud Card-Carrying Member.”
[audio]
Hannity used his October 4 Fox News program to advocate for concealed carry while discussing the Las Vegas shooting. He praised right-to-carry laws and said that “having more citizens that are armed leads to a decrease in violent crime.” He did not mention he’s being paid by a pro-right-to-carry group during the program.
Despite Hannity’s claim, as The Atlantic noted in June, “academic studies have strongly suggested” that right-to-carry laws “lead to higher rates of violent crime. The latest -- and, at least according to one of its authors, most comprehensive -- was released earlier this month by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research.” The study concluded, “There is not even the slightest hint in the data that [these] laws reduce violent crime.”
Media Matters previously documented that Hannity repeatedly used his Fox New program to push his radio sponsor’s concealed carry agenda without any disclosure about his financial relationship. He similarly used his Fox News program in 2014 to promote the fundraising efforts of the Tea Party Patriots, which sponsored his radio program.
https://www.mediamatters.org/people/ben-shapiro
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Hannity is still blaming Obama for things The stock market has been more volatile of late, and on Monday had a historic drop of over a thousand points. Sean Hannity immediately blamed the drop on Barack Obama. In fact, Hannity has been blaming Obama for downturns in the stock market for a decade now; Hannity even blamed the market crash of 2008 on Obama. Far-right circles are blaming the stock market troubles on the deep state, and one Fox host arguedthat Trump should take credit for the good of the stock market, but not the bad. Also: With the retirements of so many Americans in 401ks, it makes sense that the stock market gets a certain amount of coverage. But it is important to also remember that the stock market is not synonymous with the economy as a whole. While the stock market gets lots of television coverage, comparatively little notice is paid to things like Oklahoma schools shifting to a four-day week so that teachers can work at Walmart on Mondays, or ten percent of Amazon's employees in Ohio using food stamps. And as for the stock market swing, it says a lot about how Wall Street wants to suppress the wages of everyday Americans. |
Study: Trump supporters spread most of the "junk news" A new Oxford study shows that most "junk news" on social media is spread by Trump supporters. As Media Matters visiting fellow Melissa Ryan shows, this is a huge structural problem that ends up infecting the entire media ecosystem. Take for example the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, which research shows was driven both by Russian-linked bots and Trump supporters on social media. That it was trending on social media gave it a push to be covered by mainstream outlets. Nowadays, there often seems to be way too many things for the news to cover; that Trump supporters have figured out a way to game that without the media really understanding how is a huge problem. |
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CONFERENCES
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One way we do that is through conferences: click here for posts related to our August 2016 conference on Islam, here for photos and videos, and here for our youtube channel
LITERARY CAFES
Our past cafes in 2016 were
June: Jesse Lee Peterson and his new book ANTIDOTE: Healing America from the poison of victimhood, hate and blame
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Product details
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: WND Books (November 24, 2015)
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