John Heilemann: ‘Sean Hannity and Fox News Are a Totally Corrupt Enterprise’

At the end of his program last night, Fox News’ Sean Hannity decided that Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore had met his 24-hour ultimatum to provide sufficient evidence and address the inconsistencies in his defense of the accusations of teen sex abuse made against him. In the wake of Moore’s open letter to him, the Fox News host said “we demanded, rightly, answers from Judge Moore, and he provided them to the specific questions we asked.” In the end, the Hannity stated that the voters of Alabama need to decide.

During a Deadline: White House panel discussion this afternoon, MSNBC analyst John Heilemann absolutely laid into both Hannity and Fox News over what he feels is obviously biased coverage given to accusations against liberals versus conservatives.

With the panel noting that it is likely that Fox News’ primetime coverage will be all over Sen. Al Franken for his alleged (D-MN) kissing and groping Leeann Tweeden in 2006, Heilemann had the following to say about both Fox and Hannity:

“Sean Hannity and Fox News are a totally corrupt enterprise that have nothing to do with journalism or principle and everything to do with advancing an ideological agenda. And all their behavior…is totally predictable. That’s what they do every day on every story. This is just a particularly galling, grotesque example.

You’d like to think in this realm that we’d not care about tribes, partisan tribes or ideological tribes. But the whole Fox News empire and its entire reason for being, its profit motive, its business model, is built not again on journalism but on advancing that agenda. We have tribalism in every area but for Fox News it goes all the way to this area where, you think, it would be the one place where it wouldn’t be the case.”

Host Nicolle Wallace added that she remembered relying on Fox News when she worked in a Republican White House for generous coverage but she didn’t think it would “extend to someone accused of sort of preying in a sexual manner on teenage girls.”

Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Justin Baragona on Twitter: @justinbaragona

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