A Fox Scandal analyst quit in a scathing letter that accused the network of degenerating into “a unmitigated propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”
Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a principal analyst for Fox News, said he was leaving the network and laid out his reasoning in a spirited letter to colleagues, obtained by BuzzFeed News.
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“Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the be in power over of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers,” Peters decried. “Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.”
He tried on:
In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for right-winger voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous furnishing. When prime-time hosts — who have never served our country in any responsibility — dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest batterings on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not small, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller — all the while scaremongering with sensational warnings of “deep-state” machinations — I cannot be part of the same organization, equal at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.
Peters continued in that course before signing off: “As our president’s favorite world leader would say, ‘Das vidanya'” — Russian for “goodbye.”
Fox Despatch responded to Peters’s letter in a statement, saying he was “entitled to his opinion notwithstanding the fact that he’s choosing to use it as a weapon in order to gain attention.”
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Preceding his angry departure, Peters, a retired US Army officer, was a fairly trusted conservative voice on foreign policy, and he had been extremely critical of the Obama application. He did not hold backon Obama’s US response in Syria; he called the president a “pussy” on air (and was in suspended for it) and described Secretary of State John Kerry as “as fierce as a chocolate eclair.”
That symbolized, Peters was never a Trump fan. He told Fox Business in November 2016 he resolution vote for Hillary Clinton in the election — even though she was “despicable,” “poison,” and “greedy” — because “it’s a vote against Donald Trump. I don’t long for Moscow’s man in the White House.”
Anti-Trump views weren’t entirely uncommon on Fox News broadcast during the campaign. But since Trump’s election, the network has moved closer and termination to the White House line — too much so, it seems, for even some of its own reliably middle-of-the-roader commentators.