June 28, 2018

Sean Hannity Wasted No Time Blaming Maxine Waters for Capital Gazette Shooting

Meanwhile, his colleagues at Fox News wondered about the “ideological bent” of the paper.

As news broke Thursday afternoon of a gunman opening fire inside the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, Sean Hannity wasted no time blaming Democrats, specifically Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and former President Barack Obama, for fueling the potential motive behind the shooting. 

“I’ve been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric,” Hannity said on his radio program Thursday afternoon. “Really Maxine?” He then went on to suggest that both Waters and Obama had urged people to “get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls, and wherever else she said.”

The inflammatory comments come amid this week’s controversy over Waters’ recent remarks in which she encouraged Democrats to protest Trump administration officials in public. President Donald Trump, along with many other conservatives, immediately seized upon the comments to falsely accuse the California lawmaker of attempting to incite violence against administration officials.

Meanwhile, as reports of what had occurred at the Capital Gazette’s offices were slowly confirmed, Hannity’s colleagues on Fox News speculated on-air about the “ideological bent” of the newspaper. Anchor Trace Gallagher noted that it was very much a “local” news organization, before stating that they had no confirmed information about the gunman’s motives.

On Facebook, the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos insisted that he “wasn’t being serious” with his comments this week calling on people to start “gunning journalists down on sight.”

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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