Fox Retracts, Hannity Silenced on Conspiracy About Slain DNC Staffer (MSDNC)
Fox News announced Tuesday it had retracted a story published last week that reignited conspiracy theories around the unsolved killing of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, whose family demanded an apology from the conservative news network.
Later Tuesday, the conspiracy's most prominent proponent, Fox News' Sean Hannity, announced on his show that he would stop discussing the case "for now." It was a major back-down for a prominent host who had used his Twitter account earlier to vow he would never be silenced by "Liberal Fascism."
Hannity said he made the decision to go mum on the killing "out of respect for the family's wishes," but also hinted that he had pressure from bosses at Fox News, where he noted he was under contract.
Rich's family published a Washington Post op-ed in the Washington Post hours before Hannity's show pleading that people stop politicizing their son's death. The op-ed did not mention Hannity's name, but Aaron Rich, Seth's brother, exchanged emails with Hannity earlier in the day, the host said and a family spokesperson confirmed.
Fox News, citing a single unnamed FBI source, had reported that Rich, who was murdered last year in Washington, D.C., was a potential source of internal DNC emails published by Wikileaks last summer, implying that he was then assassinated for the leak.
The report immediately caught fire among supporters of President Donald Trump as a preferable alternative explanation to the one put forward by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials, who have always maintained that Russian hackers were behind the breach.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich amplified the conspiracy theory on Fox News Sunday.
On Tuesday, Fox retracted the story.
"On May 16, a story was posted on the Fox News website on the investigation into the 2016 murder of DNC Staffer Seth Rich. The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting. Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed," Fox News said in a statement posted online.
The statement did not include an apology to Rich's family or any admission of regret.
Rich's family had specially demanded an apology. But a spokesperson for Rich's family reacted to the Fox retraction by suggesting the family wanted to put the episode behind them and move on.
"The family would like to thank Fox News for their retraction on a story that has caused deep pain and anguish to the family and has done harm to Seth Rich's legacy," family spokesman Brad Bauman said in a statement. "We are hopeful that in the future that Fox News will work with the family to ensure the highest degree of professionality and scrutiny is followed so that only accurate facts are reported surrounding this case."
Long before the retraction, the Fox News story fell apart factually almost the moment it was published.
Within a day, one of its main sources — a private investigator working with Rich's family, but paid for by a conservative Dallas millionaire — recanted his story. The family has since sent him a cease and desist letter.
Subsequent reporting by NBC News and other outlets also found that the local police investigating Rich's death never even gave his laptop to the FBI, so there was no way Fox's purported source could have seen it.
A former law enforcement official with first-hand knowledge of Rich's laptop told NBC News definitively: "It never contained any e-mails related to WikiLeaks, and the FBI never had it."
Rich was shot and killed at age 27 while walking home late one night last July in what police suspect was a robbery gone wrong. The case is still unsolved.
MSNBC got all excited about Fox doing a retraction. All Fox said was that they would continue to report on Seth Rich's death when they have more sources to back up what was in their deleted article.
MSNBC plays fast and loose. They talk about Hannity (an editorial commentator) and his on-air editorial about Seth Rich, and conflate that with a hard news article posted by an un-named writer on Fox News' website.
But hey, Fox could have just done what all the other networks do, when the other networks are slandering Trump. Just attribute it to "an anonymous source" that doesn't actually exist, and can't be called forward to prove the story as false. But instead, Fox held themselves accountable to higher ethics and pulled the story with a retraction. Which, by the way, every other news source does when they similarly discover questionable or unreliable sources.
The facts remain: WikiLeaks got the e-mails from inside the DNC somewhere. And pending other sources, that could have been Seth Rich. Seth Rich was still murdered, and the DNC-compliant DC police officially listed it as a robbery, despite that Rich's watch, cel-phone and wallet were still on him when found by police.
So... while Fox isn't confident of its sources to fully report it as hard news at this time, it cannot be disproven either.
And the DNC is still the same party that had two consecutive chairs (Debbie Wasserman Bitch-Cunt Schultz, and Donna Brazile) who were rigging the election and rigging debates (whose e-mails released by WikiLeaks made that beyond question).
They're still the same party that sent paid thugs (paid $1,500 per event, in a payoff system with a "double-wall" of deniability) to stoke violence at Donald Trump campaign rallies, to blame the violence on Republicans.
They're still the same party of Obama, Koskinin and Lois Lerner, that weaponized the IRS against Tea Party and religious conservative groups, denying them 501 tax-exempt status and subjecting them to unwarranted audits, to suppress Republican campaign organization and fundraising, that likely allowed Obama narrowly win the 2012 election.
They're still the same party of Harry Reid, who lied about Romney's allegedly cheating on his taxes, and when confronted about the lie, only abrasively said "we won."
That's the bottom line. The Democrats, and the Democrat-colluding media (again, the collusion PROVEN by WikiLeaks DNC e-mails released) have no ethics or respect for the rule of law. And here, while Fox News demonstrated a higher standard, they demonize Fox for holding themselves to a standard that the other networks make no pretense of similarly upholding.
That's been made abundantly clear in the last year.
