Rodents And Fake News: Former Fox Analyst Claims He Was Blocked From Commenting On Trump/Russia

Last week Fox News analyst Ralph Peters quit the network with a scorched-earth statement declaring that he was ashamed to have ever worked for their “propaganda machine.” Peters goes even farther today in an op-ed for the Washington Post:

You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points. This wasn’t a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.

I was the one person on the Fox payroll who, trained in Russian studies and the Russian language, had been face to face with Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and in far-flung provinces. I have traveled widely in and written extensively about the region. Yet I could only rarely and briefly comment on the paramount security question of our time: whether Putin and his security services ensnared the man who would become our president.

Trump’s behavior patterns and evident weaknesses (financial entanglements, lack of self-control and sense of sexual entitlement) would have made him an ideal blackmail target — and the Russian security apparatus plays a long game. As indictments piled up, though, I could not even discuss the mechanics of how the Russians work on either Fox News or Fox Business.

Listening to political hacks with no knowledge of things Russian tell the vast Fox audience that the special counsel’s investigation was a “witch hunt,” while I could not respond, became too much to bear. There is indeed a witch hunt, and it’s led by Fox against Robert Mueller. The cascade of revelations about the Russia-related crimes of Trump associates was dismissed, adamantly, as “fake news” by prime-time hosts who themselves generate fake news blithely.

Oh yes, there’s more at the link.