Rachel Maddow Grabs Another Weekly Win From Fox News and Floundering Sean Hannity

A few weeks ago Fox News had to realign their schedule due to all the sexual perverts being terminated. First they lost Bill O’Reilly, and then Eric Bolling. They also lost Megyn Kelly, who was a victim of the sexual abuse from both O’Reilly and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. These scandals gutted most of the network’s primetime lineup. Today they are left with newcomers Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.

Rachel Maddow

Sean Hannity is the lone holdover and he’s not not exactly holding his own. For one thing, his support for the pedophile Republican senate candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore, is costing him advertisers (see Stop Hannity). His fear and desperation resulting from that caused a major meltdown on Sunday as revealed in a series of hysterical tweets. But his problems don’t end there.

Last week Rachel Maddow pulled off another ratings victory over her new competition. Not that they are competing for the same viewers, but having a Nielsen win during your time period is an important factor in the television marketplace. Maddow’s strength in the ratings against the biggest draw on Fox News is a significant development and a dire dilemma for Hannity.

Maddow and Hannity actually split the week with each winning two nights (Maddow was preempted on Friday by a special program). However, the average over the four nights favored Maddow. That’s because her wins were with larger margins, and where she came in second it was close. All of this points to the weakness of Hannity’s program despite being the top rated show on Fox.

Maddow’s success has had a positive effect on the rest of MSNBC’s primetime. The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell took on Fox’s new Laura Ingraham show and beat her three out of four nights. The same was true for The Eleventh Hour with Brian Williams in it’s battle with another new entry for Fox, Fox News @ Night. The only weak spot for MSNBC is All In with Chris Hayes. But although it isn’t delivering big audience numbers, it has become a sort of Emmy magnet. Hopefully over time viewers will appreciate the high quality of the show and tune in more.

As for Fox, clearly their replacement programs are not performing particularly well. But the bigger problem is that the cornerstone of the schedule, Hannity, is not only failing to maintain the network’s long-time dominance, but it’s also less viable financially as its advertisers fall away. In their last quarterly report, Fox News disappointed stockholders with a seventeen percent drop in ad revenue.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Fox’s troubles are not going to go away anytime soon. Their audience shows signs of weariness with knee-jerk, right-wing propaganda. Some of them want to know what is actually happening in the world, not the Fox News manufactured version of it. And the glassy-eyed ultra-conservatives are starting to drift off to other news outlets like Breitbart that aim to out flank Fox from the right. Even the efforts of Donald Trump, who has been feverishly hyping Fox, have not helped. It’s likely that the fate of Fox News and Trump are going to be tightly bound together in a Titanic sinking. We just have to wait until the iceberg (Russia? Mueller? Sex crimes?) takes its inevitable toll.

Sean Hannity Unleashes His Inner-Trump In a Full-Psycho, All-Caps Twitter Rant

The surest sign that someone is becoming unmoored from what’s left of their sanity is an all-caps upchuck on Twitter. It signals the impending collapse of mental stability along with a sense of grave desperation. And that’s precisely the state of mind that must be burdening Sean Hannity of Fox News.

Donald Trump Sean Hannity

In the past few weeks Hannity has been the subject of an advertiser backlash due to his repugnant support for the pedophile Republican candidate for senate in Alabama, Roy Moore. His knee-jerk affinity for a man who has been accused of serious sexual misconduct by multiple women has proven too much for many of his commercial sponsors.

The campaign to inform advertisers of the risks of being associated with Hannity (Stop Hannity) is being advanced by Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America. So Hannity has focused his outrage on Carusone in the most deranged manner he can: a series of aimless, insulting, dishonest outbursts on Twitter. In this online tantrum, Hannity baselessly accuses Carusone of being an anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist. For example:

There is so much wrong with that tweet it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the fact that Carusone is gay and his husband is Jewish. So there goes the homophobic, anti-Semitic allegations. Hannity offers no proof whatsoever of any racism on Carusone’s part. Additionally, Hannity directs this tweet to CNN and its media correspondent, Brian Stelter, asking why they would support those heinous behaviors that don’t actually exist. And one has to wonder what made Hannity think that anyone at CNN would take his criticisms seriously considering his relentless bashing of the network as “Fake News.” Finally, Hannity ended his tweet with a link to fake account on Twitter pretending to be Carusone (here is his real account).

Exacerbating the lunacy of this tweet is the fact that Hannity posted it five times in five minutes. The exact same message (although he swapped in different photos), one after another. After he got that out of system he continued his tirade with a tweet asserting that Media Matters “is atrocious as they are the most anti free speech, pro censorship group in America.” Consistent with right-wing doctrine, Hannity regards free speech as a one-way principle. He can say whatever bullcrap he wants, but no one else can reply or disagree. If they do it’s an attack on his constitutional rights.

Sean Hannity has always been an ultra-rightist shill for the GOP (Greedy One Percent). But since the election of Donald Trump he has devolved into the Fox News version of Alex Jones. He’s become America’s preeminent conspiracy theorist and hate monger. His manic idolatry of all things Trump has made him a favorite of the President who, it’s reported, calls him almost daily. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin has observed that their relationship has resulted in what he calls “the Sean Hannity Presidency.” “The only response Donald Trump has to any political event now,” Toobin notes, “is identical to that of Sean Hannity and Fox News.”

Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish any difference between Trump’s ignorant, unhinged rhetoric, and that of Hannity (or Tucker Carlson, or Laura Ingraham, or Jesse Watters, or the loonies on Fox and Friends). The only question is, is Trump the president Fox News created, or is Fox News the PR division of the Trump administration?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Angelo Carusone was interviewed Sunday on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Watch it here: