The ever-essential Jane Mayer is back in The New Yorker, this time with a deep spelunking into the relationship between the White House and the Fox News Channel operation. Of course, there is a case to be made that FNC was born a propaganda channel and never has been anything but a propaganda channel, an amplifier for radical conservatism and a safe space for pundits and viewers who think Chuck Todd is Eugene Debs. But the level of detail from Mayer's reporting illustrates that all of the operation's worst aspects have been magnified by its association with the current president*.

Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, hosts on Fox Business, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

We pause here to remind people that what we're talking about here is the government of the United States which, theoretically anyway, belongs to all of us, and is supposed to serve the interests of the entire nation, not a universe of angry white shut-ins marinating in their own blood-dimmed fantasies.

Fox News personality Sean Hannity at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, OH, July 18, 2016. Benjamin Lowy Getty Images

That FNC did a catch-and-kill stunt on the Stormy Daniels story comes as no surprise, and the attempt to monkey-wrench the AT&T merger may well have been criminal. (I do wish that Mayer, in discussing Sean Hannity's flogging the phony Clinton Cash-Uranium One "scandal," had mentioned that The New York Times was in on the scam, too.) Later on in Mayer's report, however, things get truly, madly, deeply weird.

To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Bob Beckel, Eric Bolling, Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld sit on the panel of Fox News Channel’s ’The Five’, January 17, 2017. Roy Rochlin Getty Images

Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right.” (He has promoted the idea that “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists,” and has argued that it is not anti-Semitic to observe that “the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.”) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.

When I asked Townsend about his e-mails to Guilfoyle, he said, “Mind your own business. I’m just a Fox fan. I’m a keyboard warrior. I’m a nobody.” He said, “I’ve sent stuff to various people at Fox for years, and I don’t get a penny for it,” and added, “I don’t know what tree you’re barking up but you better be careful.”

Reliable sources aren't what they used to be.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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