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.
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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.”
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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
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