Via the BBC, Amol Rajan takes a look at Fox News, Hannity and the meaning of 'collusion'. You may have seen something about the lawsuit charging Fox and the White House with putting out a news story that played fast and loose with the facts? (See Jen Hayden’s post here.) Rajan takes a deeper look at how the story came about, and what it says about the Trump White House relations with the media, Fox in particular.
...The story is complicated.
Seth Rich was an ambitious 27-year-old who worked for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Last summer he was murdered in Washington in what police think was a botched robbery attempt.
Surfing the tide of social media in the most febrile atmosphere Washington has known for decades, Sean Hannity of Fox News promoted a conspiracy theory about the death.
He claimed Rich was assassinated because he had shared classified information from Hillary Clinton's campaign with the website WikiLeaks.
*SNIP*
...Fox News later retracted the story with the admission that the story was not "subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting".
Hannity only abandoned his pursuit of the conspiracy when Rich's parents asked that their son's name not be continuously dishonoured.
*SNIP*
All this would be shocking enough, frankly, but things are so far gone in Trump's Washington that this story has inevitably developed further still.
Wheeler's lawsuit alleges that Sean Spicer, former spokesman to the president, not only knew about Fox's story, but shared it with the president - who encouraged Fox to run with it.
This despite the fact that on the day of publication - 16 May - Spicer told journalists he was "not aware" of it.
This is just one part of the story; Rajan goes on to look at how the collusion between Fox and the White House is effectively S.O.P. (Hannity is starting to gather some well-deserved opprobrium.) It’s worth a look, considering how “fake news” has become institutionalized.