Smith and Hannity live in different realities, and that is a problem for Fox News. A division between news and opinion is standard — and healthy — at many media outlets, but facts and alternative facts cannot coexist.
.. In March, Fox News suspended legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for making an unsupported claim that British intelligence officials spied on Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign at the request of President Barack Obama.
In that case, as in the current one involving Clinton and Uranium One, it was Smith who set the record straight on his afternoon show.
.. This recent history would seem to bode well for Smith. When Hannity and Napolitano made assertions that were contrary to the reporting of others at Fox News, it was the pundits who had to back down or face a penalty.
.. “Were Fox forced to choose, it would choose Hannity over Shep,”
.. “The network has clearly placed its chips on Trump — witness the reshuffling of the lineup to highlight Trumpier voices, including Tucker Carlson — and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more pro-Trump voice than Hannity.”
.. “Rupert Murdoch highly prizes and highly pays Shep Smith because he brings credibility to the network. … Hannity gets away with a lot but also toes the line when he’s asked to.
How to Escape From Roy Moore’s Evangelicalism
a new ritual has superseded Sunday worship and weeknight Bible studies: a profane devotional practice, with immense power to shape evangelicals’ beliefs. This “liturgy” is the nightly consumption of conservative cable news.
.. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson aren’t just purveyors of distorted news, but high priests of a false religion.
.. Fox News is so formative is that it’s this repetitive, almost ritualistic thing that people do every night,” Ms. Schiess told me. “It forms in them particular fears and desires, an idea of America. This is convincing on a less than logical level, and the church is not communicating to them in that same way.”
.. “Their loyalties are much more strongly formed by conservative media than their churches,”
.. “We are, ultimately, liturgical animals because we are fundamentally desiring creatures,” he writes in his book “Desiring the Kingdom.” “We are what we love.”
.. Christians should stop trying to “make America great again,” abandon the ends-justify-the-means politics that leads them to defend predators and scoundrels like Mr. Moore, and focus instead on nurturing local Christian community.
.. In a largely white worship setting, “when you have to prove yourself all the time, when your orthodoxy is always in question due to your blackness, you’re not safe to be vulnerable and honest,
.. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan .. was surprised when his publisher told him that his books on Christian contemplation and the power of liturgy are most popular with young evangelical men
.. “So many of the millennial evangelicals I work with, they’re so disillusioned with their good parents’ inability to deal with racism, sexism and homophobia — the issues tearing our country apart,” he told me.
.. “As America deinstitutionalizes and moves away from religion, people — especially millennials — have lost something. Their community becomes primarily virtual, they’re seeing people through a screen and not flesh and blood, and there’s great data that this leads them to loneliness and depression,
The ugly echo chamber of Hannity and Breitbart is why women wait so long to report abuse
“All I know is that I can’t sit back and let this continue, let him continue without the mask being removed.”
.. Their reward for this public-spirited bravery?
To be smeared as liars.
To be the objects of vicious criticism about their private lives — their marriages, divorces, and bankruptcies.
.. This incident happened almost 40 years ago, goes the outraged refrain. Why are these women only coming forward now?
.. Here’s a better question: Why would any other woman, seeing what’s happened in the past week, ever come forward again?“This is exactly why women wait 40 years,” said Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued her longtime boss, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment... “It’s weaponizing the fear and shame of sexual-assault victims against themselves,” wrote Seth Mandel, an opinion editor at the conservative New York Post. Even for Breitbart, he said, “this is some low stuff.”.. What did the Breitbart reporters find in Alabama? Virtually nothing, but that didn’t keep the media company (headed by former Trump strategist, perpetual bombthrower and Moore-booster Stephen K. Bannon) from publishing screaming headlines.. “She did not go to them — they called her,” Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, told Breitbart... We were meant to recoil in horror, I guess, at how Post journalists committed treasonous acts of journalism. Yes, they persuaded their sources to go on the record, sometimes by making the case that there is a greater good to be served.“Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.”.. Fox News’s Sean Hannity brought the network’s legal analyst, Mercedes Colwin, on his show to blast women who accuse powerful men, saying that they mostly do it for the money... Then, bringing the trashing full circle, Breitbart offered the Sinclair-owned station a megaphone with this headline: “Alabama ABC Affiliate Can’t Find One Voter Who Believes WaPo Report about Roy Moore in Man-on-the-Street Segment.” (Speaking of journalism basics, it’s almost always pointless to stick a microphone in front of random people who often have only heard the general outlines of a developing story.).. Of course, it’s not The Post’s credibility that’s really under attack here. It’s that of the women themselves, who had the courage to be named, quoted and shown in photographs.
Will the Republican Party Fail Another Roy Moore Test?
Moore, then thirty-two, targeted one girl, Leigh Corfman, when she was fourteen years old and sitting outside a courtroom where her parents, who were in the process of divorcing, were having a custody hearing. Her mother was sitting with her when Moore, who was then an assistant district attorney, with an office down the hall, first approached; he offered to watch Leigh while her mother went before the judge, presenting himself, an officer of the court, as a respectable momentary guardian. “He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’
.. because even a molesting Republican was better than a Democrat
.. because they weren’t really sure that it was bad for a man in his thirties to be sexually propositioning teen-agers.
.. the President also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”
.. Hannity, who often acts as the id of the Trumpist wing of the Party, said, “How do you possibly tell, know, the truth?”