After the embarrassing turn-around of Fox News when they issued a retraction on the Seth Rich murder conspiracy, Sean Hannity who passionately reported on it, decided to drop coverage of the case “out of respect for the family’s wishes.”
Fox News made the surprising retraction on Tuesday morning, by night time Hannity has followed his declaration to abandon reporting or commenting on the matter. He also said that he will continue to anchor his show at Fox News for as long as the network wants him to.
But amidst reports of advertisers’ pull out from the show, The Five host Kimberly Guifoyle reported that she’s taking over the Thursday and Friday timeslot of Hannity as he takes the rest of the week off. This leaves questions whether Hannity is on the way out of the network as well.
Why the hell, after 20+ years of reporting for Fox News, would one story get him fired?
After all, there’s a recent similar case to look to. When former long-running prime time king Bill O’ Reilly faced huge controversies the past months following allegations of multiple sexual harassment cases, Fox News publicly stood behind their prized host. Advertisers, however, began pulling out from O’ Reilly’s show, and then the network announced that the host will be taking a two-week vacation. They reassured viewers and supporters of O’ Reilly that everything was fine. Just a little over a week after, Fox News dropped the bomb that O’ Reilly has been fired from Fox News.
It is not surprising then for many people to wonder now- does the same fate await Hannity? The network has been quiet about questions on Hannity’s future on the show.
Will Hannity be silenced as well for reporting on an issue the rest of the mainstream media would not touch? The case of Ben Swann comes to mind. He was an evening anchor for CBS46 in 2015 and his Truth In Media social media sites, which have been up since 2012, have strong following. He reported on the controversial pizzagate story on January 17, reviving the rumor that a Hillary Clinton aide had run a child pornography ring out of a D.C. pizza parlor. Swann questioned then why nobody has done a full investigation on the case. Hillary Clinton and her Democrat allies and supporters insisted that the pizzagate was fake news and even blamed such fake news stories as one of the reasons why she lost the election last year.
Swann’s follow-up story was seen by nearly a million viewers on his Facebook Page but then shortly after that everything “went dark” and his well-followed social media sites disappeared.
Why are non-liberal journalists being silenced and why are the powers that be messing with freedom of speech? Are top Fox News executives caught up in #pizzagate?
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