THE SEAN HANNITY SHOW

ISIS Victory Over the weekend, ISIS forces took the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Is our strategy to defeat ISIS abroad and prevent ISIS from attacking at home working? Despite our airstrike campaign, ISIS forces managed to capture the Iraqi city of Ramadi over the weekend. According to the New York Times, Iraqi security forces fled, meaning that ISIS was able to seize weapons, kills members of the government and ransack military headquarters. This is considered by many to be the biggest ISIS victory since taking Mosul last summer. According to reports, this was a replay of what happened last year in Iraq, “Elite [Iraqi] units abandoned their U.S.-provided equipment to Islamic State fighters and fled the area.” This comes after military officials declared just last week that ISIS was on the defense. At home, the police chief in NYC is so worried about the threat of ISIS that he wants to assign 450 NYPD officers to fight terrorism. New York City police chief Bill Bratton says, “We need to be very concerned about terrorism … The significantly increased threat from ISIS using social media to recruit people not only to go to Syria to fight, but encouraging people … to attack police, to attack government officials, to basically brainwash them under their screwed-up ideology. That threat has expanded significantly in the now 16 months I’ve been police commissioner … We are entering a new era where we cannot live in fear, but we have to live increasingly aware of our surroundings … This crazy hijacking of the Muslim religion by these fanatics, twisting it into an ideology that’s all about hate and murder and killing.” Are we doing enough to defeat ISIS abroad and prevent it from harming us at home? Stephanopoulous Fall Out George Stephanopoulos' undisclosed donations to the Clinton Foundation continue to be a topic of conversation. Is America losing faith in the news media? Last week it was discovered by the Washington Free Beacon that ABC news anchor George Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Stephanopoulos went on the interview the author of “Clinton Cash,” which investigates donations to the Clinton Foundation, but did not disclose this fact. Even though Stephanopoulos has apologized, he failed to disclose this information to his employer, ABC News. The head of communications at ABC News admits that this in direct conflict with the network's policy: “Staff need to disclose personal donations to a charitable organization to us before covering a story related to that organization.” At this point, his punishment from ABC News is that he will not be allowed to participate in a GOP debate. But many are saying that what he's done is a fireable offense, at least it would be if you weren't George Stephanopoulos. Stephanoloulos' relationship with the Clintons is not exactly a secret. Such was the case when he was hired by ABC News. This has pundits calling into question the judgment of networks that hire former high-level staffers from political offices to act as unbiased, non-partisan journalists. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski is placing the blame on ABC News, saying that it displayed a “lack of judgement” in hiring Stephanoloulos as an anchor. Former ABC News anchor Carole Simpson says Stephanopoulos, an old colleague of hers, is “really not a journalist.” At the end of the day, the Stephanopoulos story boils down to an issue of trust. Americans want to trust that they are receiving unbiased facts from their news sources. What we've come to discover is that isn't always the case. As Michael Goodwin points out in the New York Post, from CBS' Dan Rather to NBC's Brian Williams and now ABC's George Stephanopoulos, “The hat trick of arrogant anchor scandals helps explain why Americans don’t trust network news.” It's no wonder that America's trust in the news media has plummeted to an all-time low. According to Gallup polling, “Americans' confidence in the media's ability to report 'the news fully, accurately, and fairly' has returned to its previous all-time low of 40%.” Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to trust the news media, with GOP trust at just 27%.