The Benghazi story was, of course, only a small part of the sludge that Fox dumped on Clinton’s head last year. When it wasn’t suggesting that Clinton belonged in prison for using a private email server, Fox was taking the lead in publicizing Democratic Party emails that were stolen and then released by Russian intelligence with the intention of hurting Clinton’s campaign. This is a long way from the kind of high-minded arguments that conservative pundits such as George Will and William F. Buckley, whom I grew up revering, specialized in — and that Will still makes, though no longer on Fox. (After years at ABC and a brief stint at Fox, he has just moved to MSNBC.)
There is now a conveyer belt spreading Russian disinformation that originates with RT and Sputnik — the former being Kremlin-funded and the latter an official Kremlin organ — and then makes it way to our shores via extremist websites such as Breitbart and InfoWars, before being presented to middle America by Fox. The irony is rich: Roger Ailes, who got his start in politics working for the old Red-hunter, Richard Nixon, created a news channel that now serves as a de facto information weapon for the Kremlin.
