Once again the guy Sean Hannity insists is nothing but a “pipsqueak,” Brian Stelter, has gotten under the Fox host’s very thin skin. After calling for Stelter to be fired from CNN (because Hannity didn’t like what Stelter said about him) Hannity now says he’s “thinking of” suing Stelter’s employer for slander. But Stelter never said what Hannity accused him of saying.
In case you missed it, Stelter has been very critical of Hannity’s punditry of late, especially his “reckless” discussions of Hillary Clinton’s health. In my previous post, I noted Hannity’s “Swift Boating” efforts last night with two discredited, Hillary-hating authors without a single medical credential between them.
On the same night that Hannity was cooking up his latest smears, Stelter blasted him again on Charlie Rose. Acknowledging that there is a “basket” of some legitimate inquiry into Clinton’s health, Stelter said there’s another, “truly deplorable basket” into which Hannity, Alex Jones and others fit: “These are people who bring up rumors and innuendo about Clinton’s health, and have been doing it for years,” Stelter said.
Stelter continued by explaining how Hannity and Limbaugh have helped to mainstream these rumors and innuendo:
STELTER: I’m not saying Hannity or Limbaugh fit into this necessarily, but they – some of these figures want her to be sick. They want her to be dying. They want her to be on her deathbed. It’s wishful thinking. And that’s some of this B.S. that’s on the web, it’s on Facebook. And the problem in media today is this stuff then populates our Facebook feeds and our Twitter feeds and it becomes this innuendo that we don’t just see on the front page of the National Inquirer, which is an offender here, but also then seeps into the public discourse and that’s why I think the Hannitys of the world were irresponsible.
In other words, Stelter was accusing Hannity of irresponsibly promoting baseless conspiracy theories.
But Hannity, instead of defending his work (probably because he can’t), threatened to sue CNN over something Stelter never said. Media Matters caught the threat on Hannity’s radio show today:
HANNITY: How do I get an apology from CNN? Should I—I would love to sue them for slander when they say, “Oh, he wants Hillary on her deathbed and dead,” when I said just the opposite. I mean, I know it’s hard to sue when you’re a public figure pretty much people can call you anything, and I’ve been called pretty much everything. But I’m thinking of suing them. Maybe I’ll get David Boies, my buddy, to do it.
That’ll probably happen right around the time Hannity fulfills his pledge to undergo waterboarding for charity.
Listen to Hannity once again reveal his paper-thin skin below, from the September 15, 2016 The Sean Hannity Show, via Media Matters.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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