How Trump turned Sean Hannity into a conspiracy theorist

Why is Sean Hannity,
the most recognizable face on Fox News,
begging his viewers to stop smashing their Keurigs?
It's a weird story,
and it's what happens when the loudest pro-Trump voice
on Fox News decides to go
This is news, information, and truth
I promise you can't get anywhere else in the media.
If you are lucky enough to not know
who Sean Hannity is,
think of him as
on Fox News.
President Trump, he's moving very fast
to fix the country and keep his promises to you,
the American people.
It's kind of a running joke at this point.
Trump could nuke the rainforest
and Hannity would be like:
President Trump once again doubling down
on draining the swamp.
That diehard loyalty has made Hannity
one of Trump's favorite media personalities.
You have been so great,
and I'm very proud of you.
But it's also turned Hannity
into cable news's biggest conspiracy theorist.
Because as Trump's White House has been hit
with bigger and bigger scandals,
Hannity's had to turn to wackier
and wackier stories to distract his viewers.
Come on, man.
I'm doing my job.
Hannity's favorite conspiracy theory
is his deep state shtick.
The deep state
Deep state leaks
Deep state that has been leaking on you
The belief that government agents
are secretly conspiring to sabotage Trump
and remove him from office.
An unelected part of your government
looking to overturn the results of a
duly elected president
That's long been a talking point
for conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones.
We're in a war with the deep state.
But Hannity has brought it mainstream.
A soft coup is underway.
They're planning a hot coup.
The soft coup's the buildup.
A soft coup is underway.
They're a clear and present danger
running around inside our country.
In what is becoming now a clear and present danger.
Now Sean Hannity has said
what I've been warning you of, word for word.
Hannity's also been a major promoter
of the Uranium One story.
The corrupt Uranium One deal
It's a conspiracy theory that claims Hillary Clinton
helped sell uranium to the Russians
in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.
It's a batshit theory that's been debunked repeatedly,
including by Fox News.
The accusation is predicated on the charge
that Secretary Clinton approved the sale.
She did not.
But that hasn't stopped Hannity from peddling it.
According to one study,
Hannity spent three and a half hours on the story
over the course of three weeks.
If you're ever standing in front of a graphic like this,
it's probably time to reevaluate your life choices.
There's a ton of other Hannity conspiracy theories.
The Clinton email stuff.
These are very serious crimes.
Saying James Comey should be arrested.
Comey's possible criminal conduct
Accusing Robert Mueller of trying to protect Hillary Clinton.
There's no way the American people
can trust Robert Mueller to investigate anything Russian-related.
Grow up, man.
Hannity is now the leading conspiracy theorist
on cable news,
and there's data to prove it.
My name is Alvin Chang;
I'm a senior reporter at Vox.
I was interested in
on his Fox News show.
I went to Reddit's conspiracy forum,
and I wrote a computer program to get
the top 1,000 posts.
I categorized what the conspiracies were about,
and I came up with about 100 different conspiracies
that I could search transcripts with.
I went through two years of TV news transcripts.
When we looked at the data, it turns out
Hannity far and away mentioned conspiracy theories
more than every other news program by a wide margin.
Don't think this is a coincidence.
Hannity's not just your typical right-wing pundit anymore.
He's moving into Alex Jones territory.
And unsurprisingly, Jones has noticed too.
I love it.
But unlike Alex Jones,
who uses conspiracy theories to sell survival gear
and bogus male supplements —
We have developed the ultimate male vitality supplement.
Hannity uses conspiracy theories to protect Trump,
to distract away from stories that damage the White House.
I charted out when he brings these up over time,
and it seemed like
None of that is related to President Trump.
None of it.
Zero is related to his campaign.
You look at how much Hannity mentioned
conspiracy theories in those times, they're spiked,
and they're related to the news of the day.
They're related to the scandals that
the Trump administration is going through.
Fox's best defense of this stuff is that
Hannity isn't a real journalist.
He's an opinion host, so what he says
doesn't really matter.
But that distinction between news and opinion
is rarely clear on Fox.
Look at the way Hannity introduces these segments
about Uranium One and the deep state.
Explosive new evidence in what is becoming
the biggest scandal, or at least one of them,
in American history.
It's hard to tell that this is opinion, right?
It looks just like a news segment.
And though Hannity sometimes denies
being a journalist,
I'm not a journalist.
I'm a talk show host.
he's recently taken to calling himself
a serious reporter.
I'm a journalist, but I'm an advocacy journalist.
I also do journalist work.
I have soft hands.
More importantly,
advertisers don't care about that distinction.
Two conspiracy theories in particular
have spooked Hannity's advertisers.
in May, Hannity started peddling the story
that former DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered
after leaking emails from the DNC to WikiLeaks.
Now, if true, this could become one of the biggest scandals
in American history and could mean that Rich could have
been murdered under very suspicious circumstances.
It was bullshit from the start.
PolitiFact rated it “Pants on Fire,” Snopes debunked it,
even Fox News retracted its article about it.
But Hannity continued, spending segment after segment
suggesting that Clinton operatives were somehow
involved in Rich's murder.
If this is true, this blows the whole Russia collusion
narrative completely out of the water.
It got so bad that Rich's brother begged
Hannity's executive producer to stop him,
writing, "We appeal to your decency to not cause
a grieving family more pain and suffering."
And I am not backing off asking questions even though
there is an effort that nobody talk about Seth Rich.
Major advertisers like Cars.com pulled their ads
from Hannity's show.
And eventually Hannity backed down.
Out of respect for the family's wishes,
for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time.
But on Twitter, he promised he'd keep looking into it,
saying, "I am closer to the truth than ever.
Not only am I not stopping, I am working harder."
A few months later, Hannity spooked advertisers again.
When Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore,
who Trump endorsed, was accused of multiple cases
of sexual misconduct, including child molestation,
Hannity came to his defense.
How do we ascertain what happened 38 years ago?
None of us know the truth of what happened 38 years ago.
Is that more common than people would think?
Oh, definitely.
That prompted another wave of advertiser panic,
including from Keurig, which pulled its ads
from Hannity's show.
And this time, Hannity lashed out.
He retweeted a video of one of his supporters
smashing their Keurig machines,
tweeted a 2015 article about Keurigs being covered in mold,
and suggested he'd give free coffeemakers
to the best videos of people smashing their Keurigs.
Eventually, Hannity backed down again.
Please stop destroying your coffee machines.
But not before advertisers like Volvo and Realtor.com
suggested they might pull their ads too.
Everything about this story is so embarrassing.
Masculinity is a cage.
Fox knows Hannity is a problem too.
They care about their right-wing audience,
but they care more about ad revenue.
Conspiracy theorists scare big companies.
It's why Alex Jones has to sell male vitality pills.
It's why Glenn Beck's show ended
despite him having a pretty good ratings.
Now Hannity is testing the network's limits.
And once again, Fox has to figure out
if the conspiracy monster they created
is worth the damage they're doing to their bottom line.
Thanks for watching!
Remember to follow Strikethrough on Facebo- come on, man.
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How Trump turned Sean Hannity into a conspiracy theorist

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