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Lesson from Stelter's 'Hoax': Rise up, Fox News!
Washington PostU.S. media reporters failed their readers on the night of Dec. 18, 2019. That was when the House of Representatives held a historic impeachment vote against President Trump — the third such event in U.S. history. Everyone in the national news business — newspaper reporters, TV anchors, producers, copy editors, digital producers — was mobilized for the goings-on.
Except for Fox News host Sean Hannity, who had taped his prime-time program. He had another commitment that night, so network producers did their best to camouflage the outdated material, in part by posting fresh chyrons and the like.
That sly Hannity — he got away with it. Almost. The scoop about Hannity’s magic trick comes from the pages of “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth” from Brian Stelter, CNN’s host of the weekly show “Reliable Sources” and a longtime media reporter. The anecdote comes with a helpful takeaway: “I thought he was live, like every other host was, on every other channel, on the most important news day of the year. How could he not be?” asks Stelter. “Because not a single person in charge at Fox had the guts to tell him no.”
Before “Hoax,” we knew that Fox News executives had no control over the trio of personalities — Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham — who fill out the prime-time hours at the channel. We knew that these folks said what they wanted with little or no editorial interference — a deal they often boasted about on air or in interviews — and that they were governed by no standards and practices guide. All that was clear.
It’s just more clear thanks to the reporting of Stelter, who spoke with 140 Fox News staffers as well as 180 former staffers and hangers-on for “Hoax." The interviews yield little in the way of bombshells about Fox News. The book, that is, hasn’t rocked the network with a new and durable scandal requiring evasive and face-saving corporate statements and the usual pledges to “address” some misconduct or other.