BILL PRESS (HOST): It’s not the left that has the conspiracy theory here, right? It’s Sean Hannity that has the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was murdered by Hillary operatives, I guess, because he was leaking stuff to WikiLeaks.
[...]
PRESS: That’s the insinuation, yeah. Talk about a conspiracy theory. And Sean Hannity is the one on Fox News that's been fanning this, after Fox News itself said they’re not going to report this story anymore.
MATT GERTZ: Yeah. This is pretty sick. This is – we’re well past the sort of garden variety, Fox pushing conspiracy theories here, and we -- we have moved into the realm of really just despicable behavior. The family again and again has begged for this to stop. I can’t imagine what they’re going through, and the fact that Hannity would continue to push these entirely baseless, garbage conspiracy theories after his own network has completely abandoned them --
PRESS: How can they let him do that?
GERTZ: They appear to have – they either don’t care what he does, or he is completely off the reservation and they have no control whatsoever over his show.
[...]
PRESS: But also this promise that I've got some more information that's going to break soon. I’m reminded of the “whitey tape” with Michelle Obama. Right? In 2006 or 2007. We’re still waiting. That was Sean Hannity.
GERTZ: Yeah, Sean Hannity was still talking about whether Vince Foster might have been murdered in 2007. 2007. That’s more than a decade after the independent prosecutor’s office, the park police, the FBI, everybody else says this was a tragic suicide from a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he’s out there saying, “Well, it's a mysterious death. Maybe the Clinton’s killed him.” This is sick.
PRESS: It is sick. It is sick, which is the word for it, and again, the idea that Fox News, which fires Roger Ailes, and then they fire Bill O’Reilly, this is the new leadership, right? We’re not going to stand for this kind of stuff anymore, and they leave him on the air making these kinds of crazy charges. It undercuts everything that they say they’re doing.
GERTZ: He is really -- he is the only person with a prime-time show on that network that had one a year ago. They have lost basically all of the top talent that really built and sustained that network. They have lost the top executives including Bill Shine, who had been a Hannity producer before he sort of moved into the executive ranks. Maybe they just don’t have anyone who has the stature in that organization who can tell Hannity --
PRESS: “Shut up.”
GERTZ: -- “Stop doing this.”
PRESS: “Or else.”
GERTZ: -- But he also tapes his show, so it’s not like he’s saying this stuff and they can’t stop it. They know what he’s going to put on.
