The lengths to which Fox News will go to smear Democrats are still being tested. To date they have shown no qualms about making defamatory inferences, character assassination, and outright lying. But one of the most loathsome tactics they’ve employed is their readiness to embrace unsavory characters as “credible” sources. They often cite known conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck for news analysis. And Fox News reporters are always more likely to believe Vladimir Putin or Ayatollah Khamenei or anyone rather than Hillary Clinton.

A superb example of this was just revealed with new findings by the FBI following their investigation into Clinton’s email server. Part of the controversy involved a Romanian hacker who claimed to have accessed Clinton’s server. Marcel Lazar, aka Guccifer, was interviewed in jail by Fox’s Catherine Herridge. Her report stated that he had “easily – and repeatedly – breached” Clinton’s server’s security. He told Herridge that “For me, it was easy … easy for me, for everybody,” Herridge also said that Guccifer had “provided extensive details about how he did it and what he found.”

Herridge also reported the response from Clinton’s campaign:

“There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell. In addition to the fact he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton’s server are inaccurate. It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims.”

So given the wild assertions of a jailed Romanian hacker, whose claims Fox admitted they “could not independently confirm,” and the official statement from Clinton’s spokesperson, who do you think Fox News believed?

Consistent with the Fox’s disregard for honesty and ethics, the network latched onto Lazar and his transparent deceit. Fox doesn’t care whether or not he’s telling the truth so long as it’s damaging to Clinton. And why bother giving consideration to an American who has served the public for decades when you have the word of a foreign criminal who might say anything to get a reduced sentence? However, it wasn’t long before the FBI came out with its conclusions following their investigation:

“On May 26,2016 the FBI interviewed Lazar who admitted he lied to FOX News about hacking the Clinton server. FBI forensic analysis of the Clinton server during the timeframe Lazar claimed to have compromised the server did not identify evidence that Lazar hacked the server.”

That’s a pretty definitive refutation of Fox’s star witness. This is someone that formed the basis for an extended smear campaign of Clinton that traversed across the network’s schedule. The hosts of Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt speculated that the hacking probably involved many others and would lead to a Clinton indictment. On Fox’s The Five, Eric Bolling repeated Lazar’s claims, as did his co-host, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who also linked it incoherently to Benghazi.

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

What Fox News did here was inexcusable and irresponsible. They accepted Lazar’s claims as fact and used them as a political weapon. In none of these incidents has Fox News issued a retraction or an apology. They simply make outrageous and untrue allegations and then let them fester, even after they’ve been proven false. It’s standard operating procedure at Fox News and it’s more proof that whatever they do, it isn’t journalism.