Sean Hannity has been taking a lot of heat this week for using his show to promote a sad, pathetic, unproven conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was murdered last year in Washington, D.C, who police believe was the victim of a botched robbery.
Desperate for news that doesn’t involve Donald Trump and an endless stream of scandals and bad news for Republicans, Hannity appears to have turned to this conspiracy as a way to fill his hour of screen time each night on Fox News. His promotion of this conspiracy has been hurtful to many, but none more than Seth Rich’s family. Tuesday, Aaron Rich, Seth’s brother, wrote a public letter to Hannity’s producer asking them not to have on a guest promoting the conspiracy. Seth Rich’s parents, Mary and Joel Rich, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post last night begging for Hannity to stop:
Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you have no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there are few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case.
Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.
Did Hannity agree to stop? No way. Instead, Hannity doubled down:
Always the victim (when he’s not attacking the character of murder victims and tormenting their families), snowflake Hannity began howling they were coming for his job:
Apparently that was enough for one advertiser to pull the plug on Hannity. From Buzzfeed:
"Cars.com's media buy strategies are designed to reach as many consumers as possible across a wide spectrum of media channels," a spokesperson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News when asked about Hannity's pushing the conspiracy theory.
"The fact that we advertise on a particular program doesn't mean that we agree or disagree, or support or oppose, the content. We don't have the ability to influence content at the time we make our advertising purchase. In this case, we've been watching closely and have recently made the decision to pull our advertising from Hannity," the company said.
Bill O’Reilly’s departure from Fox News was accelerated after advertisers began fleeing. Will the same happen to Hannity? Stay tuned!