Tipsheet

Former CIA Director Rips Conservative News for "Illegitimate" and "Non-Fact Based Worldview"

Enough is enough.  

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden dropped the hammer on Monday during an interview with Business Insider, saying certain conservative media outlets advance an "illegitimate" worldview with "preexisting visions."

Hayden was in charge of the National Security Agency on September 11, 2001 and oversaw operations in Iraq in Afghanistan from 2006-2009 during both the Bush and Obama presidencies.

"There are some outlets that have incredibly powerful lenses by which they view the facts they collect," Hayden said.

He said "there's an amazing consistency" between information distributed through Russian media outlets and that of conservative American sources like the Drudge Report, Fox News host Sean Hannity, and Breitbart.

"There are powerful parallels between the Russian narrative and things being said," he said.

Overall, Hayden downplayed the intelligence of conservative news reports, dismissing their reality as something based on preconceptions. 

"They have a worldview, and they are playing with it," he said. "I think it's an illegitimate worldview, and I think it's a non-fact-based worldview. It's a worldview in which preexisting visions seem to be being used to distort the fact pattern that exists."