MSNBC’s John Heilemann explains just how and why Fox News and Sean Hannity have no decency, even at long last, over a sleazebag like Roy Moore vs. the accusation against Sen. Al Franken.
As I write this, Sean Hannity has already forgotten how he will “never rush to judgment” (said just three nights ago about Roy Moore) as he has already declared Senator Al Franken guilty. But that would not be half so objectionable if anyone could believe that Hannity cared a fig about sexual harassment. After all, just one week ago, Hannity said about women accusers of harassment, “They will lie to make money.” And Hannity certainly has not minded a bit about Bill O’Reilly’s and Roger Ailes’ sexual predations.
The thing is, this goes beyond hypocrisy into a calculated effort to inflame and exploit divisions for the sake of political gain.
Heilemann gets it. He explained to Nicolle Wallace today why Hannity has gone easy on Moore but would undoubtedly attack Franken:
HEILEMANN: I'm sure Al Franken will lead the show tonight. […] Because Sean Hannity and Fox News are a totally corrupt enterprise that have nothing to do with journalism or principle and everything to do with advancing an ideological agenda. That's all their behavior. All their behavior is totally predictable on those grounds. That's what they do every day on every story, and this is just -- this is a particularly galling, grotesque example. You would like to think that, in this realm, that we would not care about tribes, partisan tribes or ideological tribes. But the whole Fox News empire and its entire reason for being, its profit motive, its business model is built not, again, on journalism but on advancing that agenda and they are -- Again, we have tribalism in every area, but for Fox News it goes all the way even to this area where you'd think that it would be the one place where it wouldn't be the case.
Wallace, a Republican who worked for George W. Bush, seemed shocked about this.
WALLACE: I worked in a Republican White House. We relied on Fox News for more generous and sort of the benefit of the doubt that we keep talking about, that we couldn't always get other places. But I would never have fathomed in a million years that it would extend to someone accused of sort of preying in a sexual manner on teenage girls.
Really? Wallace was surprised that the same network that attacked critics of the Iraq war as anti-American and promoted the Swift Boat Veterans who bogusly smeared John Kerry’s service record would put tribalism over decency?
Or was the stooping OK when the tribalism worked to her tribe’s benefit?
Watch it below, from the November 16, 2017 Deadline: White House, via Media Matters.