In Dominion v Fox News, Network Cries ‘We Can’t Make People Think We’ve Turned Against Trump’

The billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems has been proceeding at a fairly rapid pace. And each new development has proven to be devastatingly damaging to Fox News. The evidence is particularly damning since most of it comes from either what Fox News aired or private communications between Fox hosts and executives.

Click here to Tweet this article

Donald Trump, Fox News, White House

The latest wrinkle in this affair is a motion of summary judgment filed by Dominion. Included in the motion were numerous examples of Fox News personnel admitting that they knew that their reports of election fraud were lies and that they were lying in order to benefit Donald Trump. The tone and quantity of these admissions is astonishing, but it isn’t new. In December a portion of Sean Hannity’s testimony was revealed wherein he confessed that he never believed the election fraud lies.

SEE THIS: Hannity Admits in Fox News Lawsuit that ‘I Did Not Believe [Trump’s Big Lie] for One Second’

However, in this new motion the case is bolstered with a slew of new revelations that affirm that Fox News was lying all along. A Twitter thread posted by John Whitehouse of Media Matters neatly compiles the evidence against Fox by their own people (More from Media Matters here). And among the flood of affirmations of Fox’s dishonesty was one that is especially incriminating. Not surprisingly, it came from Tucker Carlson’s team who were afraid of angering Trump further after Fox correctly called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.

“We’re threading a needle that has to be thread because of the dumb f**ks at Fox News on Election Day. We can’t make people think we’ve turned against Trump. Yet also call out the bullshit. You and I see through it. But we have to reassure some in the audience.”

So apparently Fox News was more worried about how Trump would react than they were about reporting the truth. A lot of the well deserved criticism of Fox News as being biased generally toward Republicans and conservatives is only half the story. They have clearly leaned heavily toward Trump specifically. And their leanings were motivated more by fear of Trump and his glassy-eyed cult followers than by any particular ideology. That fear-based favoritism was evident in many other messages revealed in Dominion’s motion. such as…

  • Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch: Really crazy stuff.
  • Tucker Carlson: What [Trump is] good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.
  • More Tucker Carlson: I hate [Trump] passionately [and he is] a demonic force.
  • Rupert Murdoch to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott: We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.
  • Bret Baier: There is NO evidence of Fraud. None. [and] We have to prevent this stuff…We need to fact check.
  • Fox News producer Justin Wells (on Jeanine Pirro): They took her off cuz she was being crazy. Optics are bad. But she is crazy.
  • Carlson (complaining to Hannity about Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who was fact checking a tweet by Trump): Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f*ck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.
  • Suzanne Scott: You can’t give the crazies an inch right now […] The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us … We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.
  • Laura Ingraham: Sidney [Powell] is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy {Giuliani].
  • Sean Hannity: That whole narrative that [Sidney] Powell was pushing, I did not believe it for one second, [and that] she’s a f*cking lunatic.

Fox News responded to the Dominion motion with their predictably dishonest deflecting:

“According to Dominion, FNN had a duty not to truthfully report the President’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false. Dominion is fundamentally mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side.”

The problem with Fox’s argument is that they were not merely “giving a forum to the losing side.” They were overtly taking that side’s position and affirmatively arguing their case. For some proof of that, see this…

Ironically, after shilling for Trump for years, Fox News now seems to be exhausted by his tedious obsession with nonexistent election fraud. Some at Fox Fox are even starting to tilt toward Ron DeSantis (or “Meatball Ron” as Trump calls him). But they are still taking baby steps because they are still terrified of the Trump cult. Just wait until he gets a whiff of the messaging in this Dominion motion.

RELATED: Trump Post Urges His Cult Followers to Take Up Arms and ‘Physically Fight’ for the Presidency

UPDATE: Fox News is so afraid of the Dominion lawsuit that they have barred any mention of it on their network.

Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse
on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Mastodon.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

LOL: Fox News Complains that Liberal Media Accurately Reports the News – Liberal Media Replies

If there is one thing that Fox News really hates, it’s actual journalists who dare to report the news accurately. That’s conceptionally foreign to Fox News. An honest presentation of facts about current events exposes how Fox lies so doggedly in pursuit of their ultra-rightist mission.

Click here to Tweet this article

Fox News Sad

A good example of Fox’s mangling of reality is how they reported the acquittal of Michael Sussmann, a former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer who was prosecuted – make that persecuted – by special counsel and Bill Barr flunky, John Durham. The not guilty verdict was a major black eye for Durham and his efforts to discredit the legitimate investigations into Donald Trump’s myriad criminal activities and unsavory connections to Russia. After wasting three years and millions of dollars, Durham’s fake scandal factory has succeeded only in humiliating itself.

RELATED: Crybaby Trump FREAKS OUT Over the Durham Nothingburger Resulting in Acquittal of Clinton Lawyer

On Thursday Fox News reacted to the acquittal by compiling a montage of video clips from what they call the “liberal” media, but which in their view is actually all media except for Fox News. They headlined their montage “MSNBC, CNN, ABC and more pan ‘asinine’ Durham probe after Sussmann verdict: ‘A flop’” Which is uncharacteristically accurate.

However, Fox’s intention was to malign the media as being aligned against Durham, and therefore conservatives, simply because there was rational agreement in the reporting of the trial’s outcome. Their story began by saying that “Left-leaning media personalities, reporters and guests of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC and The Washington Post gloated” following the verdict. Ironically, the montage only served to publicize the intelligent analyses of the allegedly liberal press:

Nice work, Fox. Although Fox didn’t bother to rebut a single comment by any of the pundits and legal experts in the video. Perhaps that’s because there is no rebuttal to essentially factual commentaries. The only thing that Fox can do is try to create a false narrative by lying to their audience, and even turning failure into victory. Which is precisely what they did.

RELATED: Bill Barr Tells Fox News that Durham’s Failure to Railroad Clinton Lawyer Was a Victory

For contrast, Media Matters compiled a montage of their own. It contained some of the wholly counterfactual outrage that was unleashed by a variety of Fox News hacks. They struggled to find reasons to dismiss the verdict and to disparage the judge, the jury, and the entirety of the justice system. Because tearing down American institutions is what Fox News was designed to do:

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly.

Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

NAACP to NFL: ‘Don’t Fund Fox News’ Hatred, Bigotry, Lies and Racism’

For a quarter of a century Fox News has been disseminating a torrent of disinformation and purposefully twisted propaganda aimed at advancing their ultra-conservative agenda and propping up radically right-wing politicians. They have pursued that mission via a relentless crusade of flagrant lies and vicious slander.

Fox News Racist

For most of that time those offended by Fox’s deceit have sought to mitigate it by calling out their dishonesty, campaigning to persuade people not to watch, and boycotting Fox’s advertisers. Those tactics have produced uneven results. While successfully shaming many companies into refusing to advertise on certain programs (i.e. Tucker Carlson, whose show is surviving on the largesse of the MyPillow guy), Fox has the wealth and political will to keep money-losing programs on the air.

A more productive means of impacting and disabling Fox’s Lie Factory would be to persuade cable operators to either drop Fox News or put it on a tier that requires subscribers to pay specifically for that channel. Fox actually makes more from cable licensing than from advertising. Media Matters has a project aimed at addressing just that: UnFox My Cable Box.

Now another method has been initiated by the NAACP. The venerated civil rights organization’s CEO, Derrick Johnson, recently sent a letter to the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, asking him to stop helping Fox News to spread lies and hate. Johnson called Fox News “a uniquely destructive force” that “foments racism, undermines public health recovery from the pandemic, and repeatedly attacks the legitimacy of last year’s Presidential election.” USA Today reports further on the contents of the letter:

“The letter, sent to Goodell from Derrick Johnson, the president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, on March 9, and obtained by USA TODAY Sports, also says in part that ‘the NFL’s programming should not be used as a bargaining tool for Rupert Murdoch to help fund Fox News’ hatred, bigotry, lies and racism.'” […]

“In a statement to USA TODAY Sports, separate from his letter to the NFL, Johnson said: ‘It is immensely perturbing that the NFL would consider extending its relationship with Fox, especially after the January 6th insurrection on our Capitol. The NFL should not be used as a bargaining tool to help fund Fox News’ racist and dangerous programming.'” […]

“‘Fox News has gone far and beyond to disinform its viewers, inciting hate, bigotry, and ultimately threatening American democracy,’ Johnson said. ‘We have grave concerns with the NFL’s contract renewal with Fox, and we look forward to having a serious conversation'”

Unfortunately, The NAACP’s letter went out too late to prevent the NFL from making a deal with Fox. But that doesn’t diminish the potential for this as an effective means of protest. There are other organizations and other contracts pending. The NAACP has identified a rich vein of activism that should be mined by groups seeking to put an end to Fox’s destructive impact on our nation. And it’s critical that we use all the tools at our disposable to fight for truth and equality.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

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

Has Trump’s Influence on Fox News – and America – Dwindled to an Impotent Trickle?

It’s been two months since Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States. In that time of national celebration and relief, Donald Trump has retreated to his Mar-a-Lago bunker, emerging only briefly for a speech at the Conservative Political Action Cult (CPAC), and a phone-in to Senior Fox News Trump-fluffer, Maria Bartiromo.

Donald Trump, Toilet, Bathrobe

Trump is either suffering a severe depression at having been rejected by millions of voters, or he’s he’s hiding from legal process servers and state prosecutors. And while he’s cowering in near obscurity, unable to tweet his pent up outrages, his grip on the political world is slipping away. This shift to irrelevancy is evident in how the media covers his recent remarks about the COVID-19 vaccine.

Trump spent months promoting the vaccine development and bragging about accomplishments that exist only in his mind. After which he clammed up and refused to encourage his cult followers to get vaccinated. This week that changed after prodding from politicians, the press, and even Dr. Fauci. “I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it,” Trump told Bartiromo. “And a lot of those people voted for me, frankly.” For some reason Trump seems to be proud that his voters are uniquely ignorant about the wisdom of being immunized.

Despite Trump’s sudden interest in endorsing the vaccine, his former confederates in the media are not falling in line. Tucker Carlson is doing extended segments casting doubts on the safety, efficacy, and necessity of vaccinations. Sean Hannity immediately began having doubts about the vaccine after Biden was inaugurated. Laura Ingraham, in a reference to public health experts, told her audience that “it’s time to retire or just ignore the control freaks.”

This was all summed up nicely in a clip from The Daily Show that revealed how “Fox News isn’t explicitly telling its viewers not to get vaccinated, it’s just questioning whether they should over and over again”:

Trump’s waning influence was clearly displayed in how Fox News reported his vaccine recommendation. Media Matters reports that…

“Trump’s remarks will have an impact only if his supporters hear them. And while his comments originally aired on Fox, that network — by far the most popular and influential among Trump voters — has largely ignored them since.

In the 36 hours following Trump’s vaccine endorsement, Fox devoted only about six and a half minutes to the remarks. Only a handful of programs covered the remarks; flagship ‘straight news’ broadcast Special Report and popular opinion shows The Five, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and The Ingraham Angle are among those that have not referenced the comments.”

By contrast, in the 36 hours after Biden’s commentary about “Neanderthal” Republicans who prematurely lifted mask mandates, Fox News ran about 1 hour and 20 minutes of coverage about the phony “scandal.” That’s twelve times as much coverage as allotted to Trump’s weak vaccine plug.

So apparently Fox isn’t jumping on Trump’s bandwagon on this life-or-death subject. And his formerly reliable suck-ups aren’t sucking quite as vigorously. Does this mean anything with regard to Trump’s forward prospects as a politician or a public figure. Who knows? But it surely doesn’t bode well for a former president and future felon who was never particularly well liked or respected in the first place.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

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

Fox News Downplays the Chaos as Senior Trump Aide Says ‘He Just Wants to Separate Families’

As Donald Trump begins another week of disastrous White House failures, his State TV division (aka Fox News) struggles to turn mountains of presidential manure into a sweet smelling garden of blooming propaganda. The week begins with Trump bellowing “You’re fired!” at his Secretary of Homeland Security for not being sufficiently cruel. But that bit of reality TV melodrama isn’t playing particularly well.

Donald Trump, Immigrant, Child

The “Witch Hunt” that Trump is still obsessively whining about continues to be uppermost on his mind and in his tweets. Which makes the ousting of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen a convenient distraction. She is said to have been pushed out by Trump and his flying monkey sidekick, Stephen Miller. Insiders report that Nielsen was resisting some of Trump’s latest demands to violate the law with regard to asylum seekers and the babies he thinks are MS-13 members.

If this characterization is accurate, Nielsen doesn’t get any credit for finally exhibiting some signs of human empathy after a year and a half of emulating the evil headmistress of a Dickensian orphanage. But it does introduce a new wrinkle into what may be the most nauseating plank in Trump’s platform. His reasons for casting her overboard certify just how repulsive this president can be. And members of his own team are telling tales out of school. Here is what some have confided to CNN about Trump’s family separation policy:

“Sources told CNN that Nielsen tried to explain they could not bring the policy back because of court challenges, and White House staffers tried to explain it would be an unmitigated PR disaster. ‘He just wants to separate families,’ said a senior administration official. […] ‘At the end of the day,’ a senior administration official said, ‘the President refuses to understand that the Department of Homeland Security is constrained by the laws.'”

And there you have it. Trump just wants to separate families. Just like he wants to kill healthcare for millions of Americans, and cut taxes for the wealthy at the expense of working people, and bomb innocent civilians in Yemen, and promote the interests of neo-Nazis, and cozy up to murderous dictators in Russia, and North Korea, and allow the planet to become uninhabitable by driving it to a climate apocalypse.

In the meantime, Fox News is predictably ignoring these signs of the Antichrist in favor of propping up the aspiring tyrant they created, and in many ways, control. Their Monday morning programs were filled with orchestrated rhetoric asserting that the kids in cages that have shocked and saddened most of the nation were actually props employed by smugglers. Lis Power of Media Matters documented several of these scripted rhetorical fallacies here and here and here and here and here. There are simply too many of these nearly identical versions of the same falsehoods to be coincidental.

Clearly Fox News is working hard to undermine any criticism that Trump might suffer for his heartless assault on children and families. And these poor souls were already suffering so badly from poverty and violence in their home countries that they risked their lives to find safety and solace in the land of the allegedly free. Unfortunately, they chose a time when our president was a loathsome cretin who seems to have a bright orange streak of sadism. Hopefully, those of us who still cherish the principles are country propounds will prevail and we will return to being the beacon of light and that has inspired immigrants for over two hundred years.

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

Why Won’t Fox News Fire Tucker Carlson? Their Deplorable Viewers Will Watch Whoever Replaces Him

Following a week where Jane Mayer’s exhaustive New Yorker essay exposing how Fox News has transformed from a Republican mouthpiece into the propaganda arm of Donald Trump’s White House, the network is undergoing additional hardship due to its own embrace of doctrinaire hate speech.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump

The primetime White Nationalist Hour of Tucker Carlson has long been a haven for bigotry dispensed by the most smugly arrogant blowhard on television. Carlson has the distinction of having been fired from three TV networks (PBS, CNN, and MSNBC). However, when he landed at Fox News (despite his previous bad blood with the network), he had truly found his TV soul mate, where he could blather incessantly about “dirty” immigrants and loving all Americans, even the Klan members.

Now Media Matters has unearthed some recordings of Carlson when he was a guest on a rather profane radio show hosted by Bubba, the Love Sponge. His rantings were among the most repulsively misogynistic tirades ever made in a public forum by a well known pundit. In the video compilation Carlson can heard blatantly defending a convicted sexual abuser and justifying child rape:

Subsequently, there has been an outcry for advertisers to boycott Fox News (which many are already doing), and for Fox to fire Tucker Carlson. For the moment, that doesn’t appear to a likely consequence of Carlson’s disgusting behavior. His response to the controversy was a brazenly unapologetic tweet that dismissed any acknowledgement of his grotesque commentaries:

“Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”

First of all, what Carlson said wasn’t “naughty.” It was obscene, hostile, and utterly contemptible. It was degrading and dangerous. There is no excuse for the nauseating views he disgorged over and over again. Secondly, his attempt to dismiss it as having occurred a decade ago are laughably hypocritical. He surely doesn’t have the same forgiveness for the North Carolina governor’s blackface photos in a thirty year old college yearbook. Or for the decades old philandering of Bill Clinton. Or for the forty year old remarks by Joe Biden that Carlson featured on last Friday’s show.

Finally, his suggestion that the solution to this problem is for his critics to come on his show and help boost his floundering ratings is grossly self-serving. Plus, it’s a lie that he’ll let “anyone” come on his show to confront him. His modus operandi is to entrap his guests with contrived questions of the “Have you stopped beating your wife” variety. And if they manage to get the upper hand, he interrupts them and cuts them off.

So Fox News is once again being faced with a public backlash caused by one of their noxious hosts. They are simultaneously dealing with comments by Jeanine Pirro, who delivered one of her patented teeth-gnashing, spittle-inflected assaults on Rep. Ilhan Omar that asserted she was anti-America and anti-Constitution because she’s a practicing Muslim. Fox News actually released a statement “strongly condemning” Pirro, but will likely do nothing else.

What’s funny is that they could easily fire Carlson and suffer little or no repercussions outside of the PR hit. The core Fox News audience has demonstrated through the years that they will watch whatever is on Fox, no matter what or who it is. It appears that one obnoxious, lying hate monger is the same as another. So Fox could jettison Carlson and replace him with Jason Chaffetz or Brian Kilmeade and no one would flinch. So why won’t Fox fire Tucker Carlson?

First and foremost, Fox News agrees with Carlson. The network’s mission has always been in alignment with just the sort of repellant verbal abuse that Carlson unleashed in the video above. What’s more, Rupert Murdoch has been a notoriously stubborn purveyor of right-wing media. He will hang on to failing properties for years with the expectation that sheer persistence will bring success. And he has a physical aversion to conceding that he’s ever wrong about anything.

That blind faith in always being right is something Murdoch shares with Donald Trump. And something else they share is the belief that – as Trump put it – he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any of his supporters. That appears to be the working thesis at Fox News where the carnage produced by Carlson, Pirro, and others won’t have any cost in ratings. So even though it would be easier to let Carlson go and plug in another wingnut bot, Fox will cling to his revolting personage and try to weather the storm.

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

Unfortunately for Fox News, that old method of doing business may not hold up in the future. The network has been bleeding audience, advertisers, and revenue for several months. Rachel Maddow is kicking Sean Hannity’s fat arse. And the more that Fox clutches tightly to Trump, the worse their prospects have been. So time will tell if enabling jerkwads like Carlson will pay off in the long run.

Trolling Trump? ‘Rule of Law’ Republicans Run Ad Defending Mueller During Fox And Friends

The Republican Party has demonstrated that they have little to no courage when it comes to mitigating the harm that Donald Trump causes to their party, the nation, and the world. At every turn they’ve had his back, whether it was regarding breaches of the Constitution, sexual harassment and assault, infantile tantrums on Twitter, and especially colluding with Russia to subvert democracy and obstructing justice.

Donald Trump Robert Mueller

Efforts by Congress to reign in Trump’s worst instincts have been suppressed by congressional leaders like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Bipartisan bills have been drafted to insure that Trump does not move to fire special counsel Robert Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in a vain attempt shield himself from the consequences of his illegal activities. But those bills have been bottled up and, although there are sufficient votes for them to pass, the GOP leaders won’t allow them to come to the floor. Not only that, but Americans don’t want Mueller fired 69 percent to 13 percent. And that includes a majority (55%) of Republicans. Even a Twitter poll by Fox’s Lou Dobbs opposed firing Mueller (70% to 25%).

However, there now seems to be a growing assortment of GOP politicians and pundits whose disgust with the President can no longer be contained. They have launched an initiative seeking to protect Mueller from the vengeful Wrath of Trump. The Rule of Law Republicans include some of the most prominent party members, office holders and media. Their website features quotes from many of them that strongly support the work of the special counsel, including Sen. Mike Lee, Sen. Ben Sasse, Rep. Trey Gowdy, Sen. John McCain, former Gov. Chris Christie, and National Review editor Rich Lowry, to name a few. In addition to the website, the group purchased ad time to run commercials like this one:

In a particularly inspired bit of programming, they bought airtime during Donald Trump’s favorite Fox News show, Fox and Friends, in the Washington, D.C. market. They know that Trump watches the show every morning, often live-tweeting what he sees. So it’s safe to say that Trump saw the ad. And since he relies more on Fox News than the combined resources of his White House staff, cabinet and intelligence agencies, they hope that this will be a way to influence his future behavior. That may be somewhat optimistic, but it’s as good a strategy as any other.

The urgency to protect Mueller escalated significantly after the U.S. Attorney’s office raided the home and offices of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. He immediately tweeted that “Attorney–client privilege is dead!” and called the probe “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!” On Wednesday morning’s regularly scheduled tweetstorm, Trump lashed out saying that:

Of course the inhabitants of the Real World know that all of the top managers of the inquiry (Mueller, Rosenstein, A.G. Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Chris Wray) are life long Republicans. What’s more, they were all appointed by Trump. So his accusation that Mueller is the “most conflicted of all” is not only delusional, it should be seen as a bright, high-flying red flag declaring his desire and intention to terminate Mueller.

Democrats have been concerned about Mueller’s status for months. Only now are a significant number of Republicans joining those who worry that Trump will pull the trigger. What’s funny is that there is also new outcry among conservatives that Democrats are trying to goad Trump into firing Mueller. Apparently they think that demanding that Trump leave Mueller alone is a sophisticated reverse psychology scheme by crafty leftists to get him to do the opposite. How insidious those Democrats are. But Media Matters has compiled evidence of who is actually trying to force Trump to act against Mueller. And it’s mostly people on Fox News:

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

Hannity Repeatedly Called for Mueller to Be Fired in June 2017 When Trump Tried to Fire Him (Video)

Thursday night the New York Times released a disturbing story about Donald Trump’s ongoing malfeasance in office. The news that Trump ordered his White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller was another confirmation of the President’s attempt to obstruct justice and punish anyone he perceived to be a threat. The fact that the firing was only averted because McGahn refused to comply and threatened to quit doesn’t lessen the breach of law and ethics.

Donald Trump Sean Hannity

Not surprisingly, Fox News was contemporaneously backing Trump at the time without disclosing their collusion with the White House. Media Matters looked back and found video of the biggest Trump-fluffer on Fox News, Sean Hannity, advocating for the resignation, recusal, or termination of the special counsel.

Was it a coincidence that Hannity was speed-ranting about firing Mueller at exactly the same time that Trump was trying to do that? The tally per Media Matters was that Hannity pressed these attacks at least 111 times last June.

Trump was asked about the New York Times report while in Davos for the World Economic Forum. He casually sneered at the camera with his customary and tedious complaint that it’s “Fake news, folks. Fake news. Typical New York Times fake stories.” However Trump is ignoring that the story was confirmed by NBC, Politico, the Washington Post, CNN, and even Fox News. So is Fox now fake news to Trump as well? He didn’t say.

And don’t expect Fox News to bring it up. They barely covered the story when it broke on Thursday, or the following morning. And when they did cover it they dismissed it as the media being anti-Trump and using unreliable anonymous sources. However, the best presentation of Fox’s determination to defend Trump at all costs came with Hannity (of course), who was in the middle of his program when the news broke. At first Hannity predictably rejected the story as the media attacking his perfect president. But shortly thereafter Fox’s Ed Henry reported that his own source confirmed what the Times reported. Hannity’s reaction was priceless. He quickly went from “Fake news,” to “OK, it’s real news,” to “Oh look, a car crash.”

The fact that Hannity was so adamant about Mueller’s termination last June cannot be disregarded as an accident. Mueller had only been appointed in May, so there was hardly time for Hannity to get worked up about his investigation. There had to have been some incentive for him to go ballistic in so short a period of time. And since we know that Trump and Hannity talk often, it is likely that Trump encouraged Hannity to go after Mueller to justify him getting axed by Trump. In fact, Hannity’s smear campaign of Mueller last June is just further affirmation of the New York Times’ reporting that Trump was (and is) after Mueller’s scalp.

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

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:

Fox News Anchor Scolds His Fox News Colleagues for ‘Bashing the Media’

There’s a peculiar thing about Donald Trump’s campaign against the First Amendment and freedom of the press. That’s how much he actually relies on the press to spew his propaganda and lies. Without the media broadcasting his hate speech who would know about it?

Fox News Chris Wallace Sean Hannity

To be sure, he has Fox News, the PR division of the Trump administration. And for some reason they are always left out of any criticism that the President has of the “mainstream” media, despite being the top rated cable news network. For the most part, Fox News is a willing accomplice in the murder of the media. They lay it on more thickly than any other network. And they never seem to grasp the irony that they are demeaning the news business that they pretend to be a part of.

Apparently that obliviousness has finally worn through to at least one member of the Fox team. Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, addressed this issue in an interview with ABC News and was not shy about expressing that “It bothers me.”

“I don’t like them bashing the media, because oftentimes what they’re bashing is stuff that we on the news side are doing. I don’t think they recognize that they have a role at Fox News and we have a role at Fox News. I don’t know what’s in their head. I just think it’s bad form.”

Make no mistake, he’s talking about his fellow Foxies Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and the vegetative Trump bots of Fox and Friends – among others. Wallace seems to recognize that their knee-jerk assaults on any less than flattering coverage of their Orange Messiah isn’t in the best interest of journalism. And the manner in which he dresses them down is a scathing rebuke. Although he may be pulling punches by assuming that there’s “something” in their heads.

ABC News noted the obvious in their commentary, writing that Fox News is “the preferred network for conservatives.” And they cited a study by Media Matters that revealed the depth of Fox’s bias. For instance, Sean Hannity “criticized the press in 90 percent of his monologues from May 15 to Sept. 1.” And that he “used the term ‘fake news’ 67 times.” But something else stood out that makes the glaring prejudices of Fox even more appalling:

“As president, Trump has given interviews to Fox News more than any other outlet, but he has favored Hannity and other supportive hosts like Jeanine Pirro and Jesse Watters. News anchors Wallace, Bret Baier and Shepard Smith and chief White House correspondent John Roberts have been shut out.”

So even while Trump favors the garden variety sycophants at Fox, he is careful to narrow his exposure to only the most slobbering drool merchants at the network. He steers wide of anyone that might accidentally stumble over some honest journalistic principles. Even the Fox News version of a reporter must be avoided at all costs. Trump is only comfortable talking to mindless disciples. Lucky for him, there is no shortage of them at Fox News – or in their audience.

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