Although Fox News hosts and guests have reportedly been told not to name the whistleblower whose complaint was the genesis for the Trump impeachment inquiry, the personalities have brazenly flouted the mandate. One guest named the person on the air.
Media Matters has an excellent summary of the deliberate efforts to out the whistleblower’s identity (and put him or her in danger) for the sake of Dear Leader Donald Trump. Those efforts began within 24 hours of Fox’s dictum.
Most of the ways that hosts and guests have gotten around the pesky rule was by suggesting viewers read a report on a right-wing website that supposedly names the whistleblower. Media Matters notes:
Conservatives have used that reporting to suggest that the whistleblower is a partisan whose story should not be believed, even though his complaint has subsequently been bolstered by “documents, firsthand witness accounts and even statements by Trump himself.”
Martha MacCallum, Brit Hume, Charles Payne, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are some of the personalities who have blatantly suggested to viewers that they read that article.
Then there was radio host Lars Larson. He "waltzes right onto the Fox News airwaves and blurts out a name," as WaPo's Erik Wemple put it. He further wrote:
Larson didn’t make a big deal of the whistleblower’s alleged name. In fact, he mentioned it almost in passing, as just one building block of an argument he was mounting about the Ukraine situation. “I did not think of this as controversial,” Larson told the Erik Wemple Blog, noting that Donald Trump Jr. “has tweeted this out, it’s been on Drudge, it’s been everywhere except the mainstream media.”
Which is to say that Larson didn’t verify for himself the whistleblower’s name. “Do I have any sources 2,000 miles from here on Capitol Hill?” says Larson, who earned a slew of awards as a TV journalist before embarking on a career in talk radio. “No, I don’t.”
There's no way Fox management can claim not to know what's being broadcast. A Fox News spokesperson issued a statement to Wemple post Larson-blurt: “Fox News has not confirmed or independently verified the name of the whistleblower.”
Once again, this is proof that ethics and decency take a far back seat to propagandizing for Trump.
Watch Hannity promote and endorse the validity of the article that outed the whistleblower below, from the October 30, 2019 Hannity, via Media Matters.
Just as the Right Wing viciously attacked Professor Ford last year for having the temerity to publicly state what Brett Kavanaugh did to her. The Right Wing played that situation as one where Kavanaugh was somehow the victim rather than the perpetrator and where Ford was somehow a terrible person. In the end, Kavanaugh was given his political reward and now unjustly holds one of the highest judicial seats in the nation in spite of his bias and partisanship. And Professor Ford lives in fear of her life and has been forced to move multiple times and is unable to resume the teaching that had been her occupation. In other words, her life has been destroyed. Is it any wonder that nobody else wants to come forward to discuss Brett Kavanaugh?
