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
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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.
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… “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.
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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.
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… 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
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