Even after Fox News retracted its report, Hannity continued to push back.
“All you in the liberal media, I am not Fox.com or Foxnews.com. I retracted nothing,” he said on his radio show Tuesday.
He said that he feels badly for Rich’s family, but added that it’s his “moral obligation” to ask if there’s a DNC whistle blower who leaked to WikiLeaks.
.. On Monday, the Daily Beast reported that several Fox News staffers are “embarrassed” that the network has continued to allow Hannity to promote and give airtime to the conspiracy theory. Hannity tweeted the story and said, “Very interesting. My heart is not troubled in the least.”
Monica Lewinsky: Roger Ailes’s Dream Was My Nightmare
.. Mr. Ailes, a former Republican political operative, took the story of the affair and the trial that followed and made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day.
.. The story hooked viewers and made them Fox loyalists.
.. Some experts have noted that viewers found Fox for the first time because of the crisis.
.. “The Lewinsky saga put us on the news map.” As he put it in another interview: “Monica was a news channel’s dream come true.”
.. Mr. Ailes’s station may have pioneered this new style of television reportage, but the other cable news channels didn’t hesitate to join the race to the bottom.
.. Our world — of cyberbullying and chyrons, trolls and tweets — was forged in 1998. It is, as the historian Nicolaus Mills has put it, a “culture of humiliation,” in which those who prey on the vulnerable in the service of clicks and ratings are handsomely rewarded.
.. The irony of Mr. Ailes’s career at Fox — that he harnessed a sex scandal to build a cable juggernaut and then was brought down by his own — was not lost on anyone who has been paying attention.
The dark source of Roger Ailes’s power
he was trotting out his standard case about the lack of respect he received in New York, despite his immense professional accomplishments.
.. They all look down their noses at me.” Roger was having trouble making his point, though, because of the parade of well-wishers who kept interrupting to shake his hand, kibitz and flatter
.. “Kind of undermines your point, doesn’t it? Half this restaurant is kissing your ring.” “Yeah,” he replied without irony. “But they hate doing it.”
.. That worldview of unending grievance was the cornerstone
.. The Internet did not, as is so often alleged, usher in the siloed media environment.
.. Ailes did that — by proving that there is money, influence and power to be found in serving well-defined interest groups instead of trying to please the widest possible audience.
.. Ailes knew that repetition is the key to buy-in
.. The channel’s ideological prism also insulated Fox News from the bane of traditional outlets — the slow news day
.. Producers could always unearth obscure stories that would be judged trivial by traditional journalistic standards and fit them into a larger narrative about the assault on values
.. The War on Christmas, anyone?
.. “But if you try to come after me from the right, I’ll have to kill you.”
.. he had a different objective: turn talking points into news items for millions of persuadable eyeballs.
Hannity: Anti-Trump Forces ‘Wetting Their Pants Over Comey Memo’
In his Opening Monologue, Sean Hannity said the five collective forces aligned against President Trump are “wetting their pants” over the James Comey memo.
Hannity said the media, establishment politicians and others are “directly threatened” by the prospect of Trump having a successful presidency.
“If the president succeeds, they fail,” he said. “Their shock [at his win] has given way to anger and real bitterness.”