BRIAN STELTER (HOST): I think the reason why this [Rod Wheeler] [law]suit is disturbing -- even though these are just unproven allegations -- is that it's not the first time the White House has been accused of using a friendly media outlet to its advantage, right? Let's think about the Joe Scarborough example here, I think we can put on screen this claim from [MSNBC's Morning Joe hosts] Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that the National Enquirer was used as a weapon. That the Trump White House threatened Scarborough with a hit piece from the Enquirer in the hopes they'd be nicer to the president. And then there's also been reporting indicating that the White House has thought about how to use the AT&T/Time Warner merger in order to punish CNN since CNN's a part of Time Warner. So there's these other cases, this other reporting involving the Trump White House using friendly media outlets. I think that's why this suit got so much attention this week. 

OLVER DARCY: Right. And it's not -- it's not unusual for a White House to go to friendly media outlets to get a message out. But what is unusual, to some extent, is, in this case, you have [Fox News host] Sean Hannity and a former president of Fox News, Bill Shine, and others dining with the president on a regular basis, it seems like. And then you have Sean Hannity giving advice to the president of the United States, and you have [Drudge Report founder] Matt Drudge in the White House. So it's -- there's the level of -- I hate to say “collusion” but the level of collusion with conservative media to get these messages out and to discredit mainstream outlets like CNN and The New York Times is really is something I don't think we've seen before.

Related:

Sean Hannity is a full-blown propagandist 

Previously:

Morning Joe hosts: Trump team blackmailed us with a National Enquirer story

Trump campaign releases statement threatening that Trump Administration will “break up” media conglomerates that have criticized Trump

What the Seth Rich conspiracy theory is, why it matters, and why Sean Hannity must be the one to pay the price​