Statement from Seth Rich's parents today, page-2

Why is Hannity—probably Donald Trump’s greatest ally and champion in the media—so wedded to the story? For one thing, it plays into his longtime obsession with Hillary Clinton, whose alleged sundry misdeeds have continued to dominate his show alongside his full-throated defenses of virtually every move by the president. (The idea that Clinton and/or her campaign and/or its liberal allies had someone murdered during the campaign—an FBI agent, in some tellings—has long been a staple of right-wing “fake news” and conspiracy lore.) When Hannity doesn’t want to talk about negative Trump news, pivoting to Clinton is his go-to move.

But as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out Monday, a Hannity tweet hinted at another motive. “If Seth was wiki source,” Hannity suggested, that means there was “no Trump Russia collusion”—an acknowledgement of the intelligence community’s belief that Russian hackers broke into the DNC and fed documents to WikiLeaks...

Yet his loyalty to the president is beginning to take a toll. As viewers have flocked to CNN and MSNBC for the latest on Trump’s scandals, Hannity has done his damnedest to ignore them... Increasingly, viewers have responded by changing the channel: Hannity’s show, which once ruled the 10 p.m. time slot in cable news, has been bested in recent weeks several times by that of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

In [Seth] Rich, Hannity seemed to have found at last an alternate-reality drama that could compel viewers while at the same time distracting from Trump’s struggles. No wonder he’s loath to let it go.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...can_t_let_go_of_the_seth_rich_conspiracy.html