On March 28, 2018 retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, who had worked at Fox for ten years, abruptly quit. He wrote "a scathing memo to colleagues calling Fox a propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration." Saying he was ashamed to work there, Peters added, "What Fox is doing is causing real harm to our country right now."
He called his former colleagues "prostitutes" and said that Trump was "a danger to the republic." In addition, "Peters even condemned Fox's core fans, calling them 'couch potato anarchists' who wanted to 'tear things down. They want vengeance."
Much of the book, however, is devoted to the pro-Trump right-wing propaganda spewing from Fox & Friends and the mouths of the so-called "talent" -- Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity.
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham "made cultural displacement a theme of their shows. They vocally sympathized with their viewers' sense of whiteness being under threat." Carlson was widely viewed to be a white supremacist, even by people working at Fox. He was a white supremacist who claimed that white supremacy was "actually not a real problem in America. White supremacist Trump had said something similar.
Media Matters released audio clips of Carlson's telephone calls to the "Bubba the Love Sponge" radio show. On one clip, Carlson is heard joking about invading Canada, but Iraq, on the other hand "is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys" and, thus, not worth invading." Sort of reminds you of Trump's comments about "shithole" countries, doesn't it?
Both Carlson and Ingraham dramatized the so-called "caravan" heading towards the Mexico-U.S. border. Ingraham called the immigrants an "invading horde" Both were collaborating with Trump in his dishonest and futile attempt to scare Americans into voting for Republicans in the 2018 mid-term elections. It failed miserably. Instead a historic blue wave propelled Democrats back into the majority in the House of Representatives, which led to Nancy Pelosi becoming, once again, Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Most significant, however, is the attention Stelter devotes to the antics of Sean Hannity: "Trump and Hannity brought out the worst in one another. Trump programmed Hannity's show and Hannity produced Trump's presidency. Hannity fed misinformation to Trump and Trump fed it right back to Hannity."
Although Hannity privately called Trump "batshit crazy," he was nothing short of despicably dishonest when it came to his attempt to whitewash Trump's collusion with the Russians. Perversely, he played a critical role in bringing about Trump's impeachment by inspiring Trump's paranoid intrigues against Hillary Clinton, and, subsequently, Joe and Hunter Biden. Finally, Hannity's willingness to deny the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic buttressed Trump's historic and deadly failure to protect the country from it.
Hannity's role in each of these debacles will be examined in part two of this book review essay.
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