The Amoralists, Sean Hannity, Part Two, Advocacy Journalism

 

He denies being a journalist, but has said, “I think a lot of the reporting we do is better than the mainstream media.” He covets being in a position of authority, leading a movement, yet he repeatedly embraces story lines that prove to be inaccurate. He’s not a politician, but he takes positions, which have, as he puts it, a way of “evolving.” He was, for example, against amnesty for illegal immigrants, and then he was for creating “a pathway to citizenship,” and then he was against that idea.

…

Few listeners feel a connection to the personal lives of Rush Limbaugh, with his stories about his Palm Beach, Fla. estate and private jets, or Glenn Beck, with his armored cars and guard dogs. But when Hannity talks about his martial arts practice or his beer drinking or his afternoons spent hauling his kids to sports practice, he makes a regular-guy connection that sticks.

“He’s easy to listen to,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that has tracked Hannity for decades. “There aren’t a lot of complicated narratives like Beck or Limbaugh. He doesn’t claim to be the expert on anything. He’s just kind of a guy” (Fisher 15-16).

As a broadcaster, Hannity has thrived as a champion of insurrection. In the early 1990s, he rose to regional prominence as a staunch backer of Gingrich’s crusade to wrest control of Congress from the Democrats; after joining WABC in 1997, he rode the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the top of the New York talk-radio charts. And in 2009, he threw his support behind the Tea Party, a movement that inspired his early support for Trump. He became cable TV’s most ardent booster of the movement, giving ample airtime to various Tea Party figures and broadcasting his television and radio programs from a Tea Party rally in downtown Atlanta. “It was exciting,” Hannity recalls. “There was so much energy, and they were talking about all the [expletive] I’d been talking about for years: Small government, lower taxes” (Shaer 14).

Though he's fixed in the public mind as a TV talker, Hannity is the nation's second-highest-rated radio host, behind only Limbaugh. He's No. 1 in the key 25-54 audience among cable news shows. He makes $36 million a year, according to Forbes, which ranked him No. 77 among the world's top-paid celebrities. (Two other radio hosts, Howard Stern and Limbaugh, made the top 100, both way above Hannity's pay grade.)

… Hannity retains enough blue-collar cred to position himself as a scrappy fighter for the regular guy. “My overpaid friends in the media, well, they have their chauffeur-driven limousines, they like their fine steakhouses and expensive-wine lifestyles,” he told viewers last fall. “The people you’re watching on TV” do not feel your pain. “And therein lies the contempt.”

…

Hannity has done one hour of TV and three of radio every day for 21 years. Through the George W. Bush years, he loyally supported the president's policies. Then, during the Obama presidency, Hannity's tone shifted. He leaned more heavily on stories he believed were being given short shrift by the "liberal media" — stories about where Obama was born, and who deserved blame for the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

It wasn’t winning over a new audience. By 2013, Hannity’s audience was shrinking; it was the year after a presidential election, when cable news numbers typically droop, but Fox News, still under Ailes’s iron leadership, was talking about changing the channel’s approach.

“We are beginning to dramatically change the way news is presented to the public,” Ailes wrote in a memo announcing that Hannity would move from 9 p.m., the heart of prime time, to 10 p.m., losing the cherished time slot to Megyn Kelly, who, Fox hoped, might lure a younger audience. Kelly’s numbers soared. Hannity’s fell by a quarter between 2009 and 2014.

Four years later, Kelly is gone, moved to NBC; Ailes is dead, having spent his final months denying sexual harassment allegations, which also felled former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Hannity is the only remaining original prime-time talk show host from Fox’s launch (Fisher 15- 21).

In 1996, [Rupert] Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, … “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.” The formula worked spectacularly well. By 2002, Fox had displaced CNN as the highest-rated cable news network, and it has remained on top ever since.

In 2011, at Ailes’s invitation, Trump began making weekly guest appearances on the morning show “Fox & Friends.” In a trial run of his campaign tactics, he used the channel as a platform to exploit racist suspicions about President Barack Obama, spreading doubt about whether he was born in America. (In one segment, Trump suggested that Obama’s “family doesn’t even know what hospital he was born in!”) … “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’”

Trump’s arrival marked an important shift in tone at Fox. Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd” (Mayer 10).

... in 2011 he [Hannity] aired a television interview with Trump, then toying with running for president the following year, during Trump’s crusade to force President Obama to release his birth certificate. Obama, Trump said, “could have easily have come from Kenya, or someplace.”

“The issue could go away in a minute,” Hannity interjected. “Just show the certificate” (Shaer 14). [In so many words, state the unnecessary and let the insinuation linger.]

… [Ultimately, Hannity] returned to his 9 p.m. home, making way for Laura Ingraham to take over the 10 p.m. slot. ...

Hannity’s comeback coincided with his early, eager embrace of his fellow New Yorker. As early as the fall of 2015, Hannity wore a Trump-brand necktie to interview the upstart candidate at the CPAC convention in Maryland. As some conservative talk hosts pronounced themselves Never Trumpers or came to his side late and halfheartedly, Hannity went all in.

When Hannity “hitched his wagon to Trump, ...he got access and access brought ratings.” Trump insiders used Hannity’s show as their safe space. When things got hot, Donald Trump Jr., Sebastian Gorka and the candidate himself went on Hannity.

Trump attacked the Gold Star father, and Hannity stood by him. Trump went after a federal judge of Mexican descent, and Hannity backed him. Even after the "Access Hollywood" tape emerged of Trump boasting about grabbing women, Hannity defended his guy: "King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud."

Hannity’s "advocacy journalism" sometimes entails passing along stories that never quite check out. He used his TV show ... to promote the false rumor that Hillary Clinton was hiding a severe health crisis. He let Trump push the baseless idea that Ted Cruz's father was somehow involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination. "I saw that somewhere on the Internet," Hannity said.

After the [2016] election, Hannity doubled down on his loyalty. He defended the administration’s false contention that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest ever.

And Hannity spent many hours hawking a discredited theory whereby a murdered Democratic National Committee employee, Seth Rich, was said to have been killed by Democratic operatives because he supposedly had leaked emails that were embarrassing to Hillary Clinton. Fox News retracted its report that had lent credence to the theory, and police affirmed that the scenario had no validity; the murder was the result of a robbery gone bad.

Through much of the spring, Hannity kept at the story, backing off only after Media Matters urged his advertisers to pull their ads. … (Fisher 17-18)

In a campaign season rife with handwringing over the media's coverage of Trump, Hannity does no handwringing. He has embraced his role as the face of anti-establishment conservative media. Critics debate whether he's spent more time interviewing Trump or Cruz, but that is hardly the salient point. What matters is that he always offers Trump — who increasingly looks poised to be the Republican nominee, and therefore Hannity's pick for president — robust praise and safe harbor from criticism.

In his interviews, Hannity frequently cites areas where he agrees with Trump, or where he thinks Trump was right about something, then asks him to expand on it. Many questions function as a set-up for Trump to discuss anything he wants: "If you win Florida and Ohio, you are well on your way to the nomination to be the Republican nominee for president," Hannity said during a March interview. "How would that make you feel?"

Hannity often ignores or defends Trump from criticism. When he interviewed Trump in the heat of the controversy over of his failure to disavow the Klu Klux Klan, he never asked Trump about it. After the CNBC debate, Hannity said to Trump: "I felt [moderator] John Harwood was extraordinarily unfair to you and attacking you... I've got to imagine that that's pretty aggravating for you. What's your reaction to it?"

…

Hannity's unapologetic advocacy has won him the support of Trump's base, a vocal coalition that loathes most members of the media. While he is hardly the only pro-Trump pundit, no other has the immense platform that is Fox News. In the first three months of 2016, Hannity averaged 1.88 million viewers a night, and his radio show is the second most-listened-to talk show in the country after Rush Limbaugh's (Byers 2-3).

… Mr. Hannity is not only Mr. Trump’s biggest media booster; he also veers into the role of adviser. Several people I’ve spoken with over the last couple of weeks said Mr. Hannity had for months peppered Mr. Trump, his family members and advisers with suggestions on strategy and messaging.

…

Mr. Hannity’s show has all the trappings of traditional television news — the anchor desk, the graphics and the patina of authority that comes with being part of a news organization that also employs serious-minded journalists like Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly.

But because Mr. Hannity is “not a journalist,” he apparently feels free to work in the full service of his candidate without having to abide by journalism’s general requirements for substantiation and prohibitions against, say, regularly sharing advice with political campaigns.

So there was Mr. Hannity last week, devoting one of his shows to a town hall-style meeting with Mr. Trump at which his (leading) questions often contained extensive Trumpian talking points— including the debunked claim that Mr. Trump opposed the Iraq invasion. (As BuzzFeed News first reported, Mr. Trump voiced support for the campaign in a 2002 discussion with the radio host Howard Stern.)

On other days, he has lent his prime-time platform to wild, unsubstantiated accusations that Hillary Clinton is hiding severe health problems. He showed a video of a supposed possible seizure that was in fact a comical gesture Mrs. Clinton was making to reporters, as one of them, The Associated Press's Lisa Lerer, reported. He also shared a report from the conservative site The Gateway Pundit that a member of Mrs. Clinton’s security detail appeared to be carrying a diazepam syringe, “for patients who experience recurrent seizures.”

A simple call to the Secret Service spokeswoman Nicole Mainor, as I made on Friday, would have resulted in the answer that the “syringe” was actually a small flashlight.

People in Mr. Hannity’s audience of 2.5 million who are inclined to believe the health allegations, and who believe the mainstream media are covering for Mrs. Clinton, are unlikely to be impressed by the Secret Service’s explanation (Rutenberg 2-4)

Various conservative bloggers and posters on Reddit have pointed to of Clinton being helped up the stairs (as Snopes pointed out, this is a single old photo and there are plenty of pictures of her climbing stairs just fine). They’ve alleged without evidence that Clinton's heart is too weak to manage the strain. On Fox News, Sean Hannity showed a photo of Clinton making a face and suggested that she’s having a seizure.

…

These insinuations have been debunked by sites like Snopes.com and Politifact. Nevertheless, Fox News’s Sean Hannity dedicated a week of coverage to "investigating" Clinton’s health, bringing on a panel of medical experts — “Fox News Nedical A-Team”— to diagnose Clinton’s possible ailments. None of these experts had ever examined Clinton personally and were going off photos and allegations surfaced on the web (Golshan 4-5).

Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday shared a conspiracy theory with his 1.7 million Twitter followers which baselessly alleged that Hillary Clinton was drunk at a rally last week.

“God help us,” Hannity wrote on Twitter, retweeting the account “MicroSpookyLeaks,” which claimed “Secret Service says Hillary was drunk” in video taken of the October 27 event.

Hannity later claimed in tweets that he only found the video amusing and wasn’t actually trying to further the conspiracy theory.

But Hannity has promoted a similar theory in the past. His website featured a story on Friday citing a hacked email published by WikiLeaks about Clinton needing to "sober ... up” (Darcy 1).

Works cited:

Byers, Dylan, “Sean Hannity Embraces Donald Trump, without Apology.” CNN Business, May 2, 2016. Net. https://money.cnn.com/2016/05/02/media/sean-hannity-donald-trump-profile/

Darcy, Oliver. “Sean Hannity Promotes Conspiracy Theory Clinton Was Drunk at Rally, then Claims He Didn't Mean To Do So.” Business Insider, October 31, 2016. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/sean-hannity-hillary-clinton-conspiracy-drunk-2016-10?r=US&IR=T

Fisher, Marc. “The Making of Sean Hannity: How a Long Island Kid Learned to Channel Red-State Rage.” The Washington Post, October 10, 2017. Net. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-making-of-sean-hannity-how-a-long-island-kid-learned-to-channel-red-state-rage/2017/10/09/540cfc38-8821-11e7-961d-2f373b3977ee_story.html

Golshan, Tara. “Here's How We Know the Bonkers Conspiracy Theory about Hillary Clinton's Health Is Catching On.” Vox, August 23, 2016. Net. https://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12505078/hillary-clinton-health-stroke-conspiracy-fake

Mayer, Jane. “The Making of the Fox News White House.” The New York Times, March 4, 2019. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house

Rutenberg, Jim. “Sean Hannity Turns Adviser in the Service of Donald Trump.” The New York Times, August 21, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/business/media/sean-hannity-turns-adviser-in-the-service-of-donald-trump.html

Shaer, Matthew. “How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?” New York Times, November 28, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/magazine/how-far-will-sean-hannity-go.html

The Amoralists, Sean Hannity Part One, Getting Established

What is an amoral person?

Answer – having or showing no concern about whether behavior is morally right or wrong

Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amoral

***

Hannity was born in 1961, the youngest of four siblings and the only boy. His parents, Hugh and Lillian, were first-generation Irish-Americans, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and the Bronx, respectively. When Hugh returned from fighting in the Pacific in World War II, he and Lillian sank all their savings into a modest home in Franklin Square, then a redoubt of socially conservative Irish, Italian and Jewish working-class families.

Both Hugh and Lillian worked throughout Sean’s childhood, Hugh as a family-court officer in the city and Lillian as a stenographer and a corrections officer at a county jail. In the evenings, there was a fug of Pall Mall smoke in the air and, occasionally, his mother’s pistol sitting on the kitchen table. Hugh allowed Sean to take his first shooting lesson at 11, inspiring his love of guns; today, Hannity has a concealed-carry permit for his .40 Glock.

…

… “I just wasn’t that interested in school. It bored me to tears.” He clashed frequently with the nuns at Sacred Heart Seminary, and by high school, he was cutting class to smoke with his classmates.

…

Lillian and Hugh, originally supporters of John F. Kennedy, had, in the manner of much of white working-class America, gradually shifted their allegiance to the Republican Party, but neither had any interest in talking politics at home. Radio was Hannity’s tutor: From morning till night, he’d tune into local right-wing talkers like Bob Grant and Barry Farber, progenitors of the hyperpoliticized style that Rush Limbaugh would perfect.

Grant is today best remembered for his declaration, in 1991, that the United States was being taken over by “millions of subhumanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari.” He was adept at toggling between genteel patter, with guests he agreed with, and explosions of indignant fury, at those he didn’t. …

In Hannity’s youth, “it was never, ‘Turn off the television!’ ” he recalls. “It was: ‘Turn that blankety-blank radio off now! Turn it off!’ And I’d say, ‘Fine,’ and then my parents would leave, and I’d put it back on.”

In the 1980s, after two years of college at New York University and Adelphi University, Hannity and [James] Grisham [future producer of the Sean Hannity radio show] drove up to Rhode Island, where they opened a wallpaper and design business. Between jobs, he [Hannity] read the novels of Taylor Caldwell, a conservative writer and member of the John Birch Society. Man “was made for rude combat” and “crude ferocity,” Caldwell writes in the novel “Bright Flows the River,” which Hannity, a martial-arts practitioner, cites as a favorite.

In 1989, now living in Santa Barbara, Calif., Hannity began calling in to the local talk station, KTMS, to argue the merits of the Reaganite worldview he’d absorbed from Grant and others. That fall, he applied for an unpaid position at KCSB, the radio station of the University of California, Santa Barbara. (Shaer 20-21).

… the then-28-year-old Hannity not only served as KCSB’s interim production director but had his very own time slot on the programming schedule. Though not a UCSB student, he managed to get involved with the station while working locally as a building contractor. Back in those days, he possessed, by his own admission, none of his current on-air slickness: “I wasn’t good at it,” he once admitted of his time at KCSB, during an interview on CBS’s The Early Show. “I was terrible.” And even though he only logged 40 total hours in the station’s control room, that was enough time to do what pundits, even rookie ones, do best: Stir up a little controversy (Daily 2)

As a host, Hannity was quick to test boundaries, to jab at what he regarded as the liberal pieties of the student body. After just a few months on the air, he invited onto his program a Lutheran minister named Gene Antonio, who contended that the government was hiding the truth about the AIDS crisis. “First of all, the rectum is designed to expel feces, not take in a penis, and so what happens is the body rebels against that,” Antonio told Hannity, explaining his theory of why gay men were prone to various diseases.

In a later broadcast, Hannity took a call from Jody May-Chang, the host of a KCSB show called “Gay and Lesbian Perspectives.” Hannity asked if it was true that May-Chang had a child with another woman. It was, May-Chang said. Hannity shot back that he felt sorry for the kid. “I think anyone that believes, anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is just a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed,” Hannity concluded.

Richard Flacks, then the station’s faculty adviser, says that “it was this specific moment when he deals with Jody that was something more than repulsive speech.” After the studio took the young host off the air, Hannity contacted a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union and successfully petitioned the university for a second chance. Then, in an act of characteristic bravado, he called for a public apology and an extra hour on the air every day. He was turned down.

…

… it was the start of a pattern that would repeat throughout his radio and TV career: Poke, prod, provoke, step back and do it all over again. (Shaer 22-23).

After growing a modest audience in his short time at KCSB, Hannity advertised himself in publications as “'the most talked about college radio host in America” which landed him a gig as the afternoon talk host of WVNN in Athens, Alabama. Let's get this straight: the guy went from contracting work in bleeding blue SoCal to ultra-conservative union-basher in the Deep South? From what the US News & World Report would likely call the "top-ranked bong-smoking university in America" to sharing ideologically driven airspace with Rush Limbaugh!?

Incredible (Daily 2)!

Bill Dunnavant, Hannity’s boss at his first professional radio gig, in … Ala., recalled turning on the radio one afternoon and hearing Hannity engaging in a contentious live interview with the madam of a Nevada brothel. Dunnavant told me he pulled over at the nearest pay phone. “Don’t you ever do that again!” he shouted at Hannity. “This is a family station.”

Hannity told me [Matthew Shaer], “You know, the only way to be successful — it took me a little while to figure it out — is you’ve got to be yourself on the radio.” His ratings slowly improved, and in 1992, he accepted a job at WGST in Atlanta, one of the largest markets in the south. At WGST, he alternated condemnation of the White House-bound Bill Clinton, an early Hannity bête noire, with lighter fare, like a one-off April Fools’ Day segment in which he prodded young callers to vow not to engage in premarital sex. He also began periodically traveling to New York to appear as a political commentator on daytime programs hosted by Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael. The segments were short, but the camera liked Hannity’s blocky features and his forceful delivery.

In 1996, Hannity’s agent, David Limbaugh, got word of a new cable network being funded by the Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch. Limbaugh had an inside line — the network’s head, Roger Ailes, had helped start his brother Rush’s television show. He suggested Hannity apply.

A few hours later, Hannity was in Ailes’s office in New York. Their conversation was short and straightforward: “Roger goes, ‘Great, you’re going to do a debate show,’ ” Hannity remembers. “And that’s all it took. My life changed forever.”

Hannity’s program was given the all-important 9 p.m. slot at Fox News, but through the summer of 1996, as the network edged closer to its debut, the show still had no co-host. Ailes brought in a range of options, including Joe Conason, a seasoned investigative reporter who was then the executive editor of and a liberal columnist for The New York Observer. Conason did a screen test but was never asked back; eventually, the job went to the mild-mannered Alan Colmes. (Colmes died in February [2017] of lymphoma.) “I came to the conclusion that Roger wanted a handsome, smart conservative on one side and a nerdy liberal on the other,” says Patrick Halpin, a commentator and frequent guest on “Hannity & Colmes.” “Alan, God rest his soul, was smart and knowledgeable, but he wasn’t Joe, who would’ve been too strong for Hannity” (Shaer 24-25).

[Joe Conason recalled:]

“I’m not sure anything would’ve been very different, but that process showed Fox was set up as a con—the opposite of fair and balanced—at the very beginning. From what I’ve heard over the years, it’s clear that Roger Ailes and Hannity arranged a fixed fight.” “I knew Roger before Fox, and while we certainly weren’t friends, he had always treated me with respect—until then. He wouldn’t return my calls for several months after that audition, and I think it was because he felt ashamed. When we finally talked, he made up an excuse about what had happened that we both knew was bullshit.” And it worked like a charm (Warren 4).

For his producer, Hannity proposed Bill Shine, whom he met while subbing in as a host on a short-lived cable network called NewsTalk Television. “The worst thing you can do to Sean Hannity,” Shine told me, “is remind him of his first day.” Hannity was stiff and “petrified,” in his own recollection, prone to tensing up in front of the camera. At one point, Hannity and Shine ran into each other in a parking garage on 48th Street, near the Fox headquarters. Shine asked Hannity if he thought the show would last five years. “Five years would be great,” Hannity said.

In 1997, Hannity took a nighttime radio slot at WABC — the show went into national syndication the day before the 9/11 attacks — and learned to use the radio program as a workshop for television. On WABC, he could afford to float new ideas, test new lines of attack. By the next day, in time for the start of “Hannity & Colmes,” the material had been sharpened and refined into talking points he could fire at his Fox audience. It was in this manner — percussively, repeatedly — that he helped bolster the case for an invasion of Iraq and chipped away at Republican support for a bipartisan 2007 path-to-citizenship bill that later perished in the United States Senate (Shaer 26-27).

Hannity left WGST [in 1996] for New York, where WABC had him substitute for their afternoon drive time host during Christmas week. In January 1997, WABC put Hannity on the air full-time, giving him the late-night time slot. WABC then moved Hannity to the same drive-time slot he had filled temporarily a little more than a year earlier. Hannity was on WABC's afternoon time slot from January 1998.

In their 2007 book Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War That Is Destroying America, conservative Cal Thomas and liberal Bob Beckel describe Hannity as a leader of the pack among broadcasting political polarizers, which … they define as those who have "an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival group" The WABC slot continued until the end of 2013. Since January 2014, Hannity has hosted the 3:00–6:00 p.m. time slot on WOR in New York City.

… The Sean Hannity Show began national syndication on September 10, 2001, on more than five hundred stations nationwide. ... (Wikipedia 5)

When Colmes left “Hannity & Colmes” in 2009, the program was rebranded as just “Hannity,” and dressed up in American-flag-inspired graphics. Hannity credits Ailes for sticking with him long enough to see him prosper on television. The Fox C.E.O., Hannity told me, “was a father figure,” and in 2016, Hannity vociferously defended his boss in the face of sexual-harassment allegations. (With Hannity, as with Trump, loyalty is paramount, and although he and the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly have not always gotten along, “Hannity” was O’Reilly’s first stop at the network after being fired from Fox this year [2017] in response to allegations of sexual harassment.) (Shaer 28)

Works cited:

“Sean Hannity: Construction Worker, Union Member, Sack of Sh*t.” Daily Kos, December 19, 2912. Net. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/12/19/1171909/-Sean-Hannity-Construction-Worker-Union-Member-Sack-of-Sh-t

Shaer, Matthew. “How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?” New York Times, November 28, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/magazine/how-far-will-sean-hannity-go.html

“Sean Hannity.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Hannity

Warren, James. “How Roger Ailes Created Sean Hannity.” Vanity Fair, November 29, 2017. Net. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/how-roger-ailes-created-sean-hannity

 

Letters, 2021, Cannot Be Said Enough, December 1; December 23, January 5; December 24

 

Please read the following excerpts from the outstanding The Atlantic December 6, 2021, article about what many media observers are asserting: that the Republican Party is conducting a slow-moving coup to establish permanent one-party, Republican Party autocratic rule. The two letters that I wrote this December focused precisely on that subject matter.

***

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.

As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.

Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.

…

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

…

Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.

…

… the Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost. Delegitimating Biden’s victory was a strategic win for Trump—then and now—because the Big Lie became the driving passion of the voters who controlled the fate of Republican legislators, and Trump’s fate was in the legislators’ hands.

…

… Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. …

In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.

Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.

…

The coming midterm elections, meanwhile, could tip the balance further. Among the 36 states that will choose new governors in 2022, three are presidential battlegrounds—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—where Democratic governors until now have thwarted attempts by Republican legislatures to cancel Biden’s victory and rewrite election rules. Republican challengers in those states have pledged allegiance to the Big Lie, and the contests look to be competitive. In at least seven states, Big Lie Republicans have been vying for Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, the office that will oversee the 2024 election. Trump has already endorsed three of them, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.

…

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.

…

Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters ... are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this [what he has been doing, and not doing].

The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.

Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.

Work cited:

Gellman, Barton. “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” The Atlantic, December 6, 2021. Net. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

***

I sent this letter off to the editor of the Siuslaw News December 1. She did not print it.

***

What are this newspaper’s right-wing letter writers being silent about?

We’ve been reading recently this kind of stuff.

Tony Cavarno (Nov. 24): the rise of white nationalism is not true, Democratic assertions are “liberal socialistic crap,” Trump’s (ballyhooed) economic achievements are fabulous (not according to Snopes.com and other fact-check organizations). Note: Trump ranks 41 of our past 45 presidents, according to CSPAN’s latest (June 2021) change-of-administration survey of historians, professors, and other knowledgeable professionals. He was judged dead last in the categories “moral authority” and “administrative skills.”

Marshall Denton (Nov. 27): a lengthy list of Democrat-defaming word frames that included “mandates,” business closures,” “open borders,” “CRT,” and “the propagation of division and racism.”

None of Florence’s right-wingers have addressed Trump’s “Big Lie”!

For decades the GOP has asserted Democratic Party-generated large-scale voter fraud in national and state elections to justify Republican Party passage of onerous voter suppression laws. Those minority, college-age, and octogenarian voters sure do get around and cheat! Honest investigations have repeatedly reported that voter fraud has been in the past and was in the 2020 election minuscule.

So now red state legislatures – already masters of gerrymandering – are passing laws to grant themselves the power to declare election fraud whenever they wish (a la Trump) and reverse Democratic Party victories!

So, you right-wing letter writers, like so many of your Republican office holders, are you okay with this – the destruction of our nation’s democracy and the inevitable establishment of one-party autocratic rule – if your party is doing it? I hope not.

***

While I waited in vain for the Siuslaw News to print my letter, I felt the need to really let loose. I was in a deep funk. I sent this letter to The World newspaper in Coos Bay.

***

We do not determine the time and place of our birth or our parents. We are not “created equal.” Not one of us is guaranteed “equal opportunity.” All of us will witness -- if not experience directly – exploitation, persecution, cruelty. Why? Human beings are egregiously fallible. Evil – not compassion, good works – prevails. Selfish beings trample upon the vulnerable to amass power, wealth. Liars, cheaters triumph.

I have lived 87 years. I once believed that here in American good people could keep at bay indefinitely that which the worst of us collectively fabricate. I have learned that we Americans are no better morally than the inhabitants of almost any nation or culture.

We have among us

the timid, managed by authoritarian fear-mongers;

the mediocre “every man” so protective of his Caucasian privilege that he embraces anything disseminated hatefully about minorities;

the voluntarily and not voluntarily uneducated so ignorant of fact that their emotions choose whom to trust.

We have, controlling the susceptible, a plethora of opinion-shapers devoid wholly of honesty and conscience.

Our country is months away from becoming an autocracy. Fox News, hate-talk radio, conspiracy-disseminating web sites, TV-hungry Republican Party fabricators, and fascist-minded legislators are accomplishing their coordinated objective.

60% of registered Republicans believe the humongous lie that Biden stole the 2020 election. Never mind the minuscule evidence of such. Or that their party continues to gerrymander, purge voter registration lists, employ aggressive voter suppression tactics.

The GOP knows it can no longer win honest Presidential elections. Its red state legislatures and governors are passing laws that grant them the power to reverse future Democratic Party victories. Federal legislation could stop this coup. Absent its passage, Democracy dies.

        Printed December 23, 2021, in The World

                    January 5, 2022, in the Siuslaw News

***

Joe Mack-McCarthy sent me this message Dec. 24 via Facebook Messenger:

Harold... I'm from Coquille originally, lived in Portland for 45 years. I read your letter to the editor in the World. You are much appreciated for speaking out and making your feelings public. I have to thank you, sir.

***

I decided to send the letter printed Dec. 23 in The World to the Siuslaw News to see if the editor would print it just before the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the federal Capitol building. She did, January 5, changing nothing.

***

No follow-up from Republican loyalist letter writers as of January 16.