[Editor’s note: original headline revised to avoid confusion.]
Sean Hannity, one of Fox News Channel’s most popular personalities and a presidential advisor (“I never claimed to be a journalist,” he says), found himself the subject of mockery in a Meidas Touch video. The video splices the FNC star’s words with clips of the President of the United States, to create a more accurate commentary than anything we can expect to hear on Fox.
Hannity complained to Twitter (since his words were directed at Trump’s enemies, not at the man himself), which responded by posting a Manipulated Media warning. Meidas Touch was undaunted.
Although FNC has a history of employing manipulated media in its broadcasts, something more significant is going on with the outlet: Fox News Channel manipulates news and information, facts and context, to distract and deceive its conservative audience (which has been trained not to trust what are clearly more trustworthy sources of news, information, facts, and context). That manipulation is the raison dêtre of FNC.
Journalists (like doctors and scientists) make mistakes, but they strive to get things right. “Conservative media do not embrace this journalistic mission (or the ethos of science) to inform accurately. Their job, in the conservative media ecosystem, is to bolster faith in their leader, to cast doubt on facts that might undermine that faith, and to attack and disparage anyone who contradicts the message of the day.”
(Image: Sean Hannity with his conspiracy chart via Vox.com.)