The Amoralists, Sean Hannity, Part Three, Mueller Report, Coronavirus

 

… Trump’s most consequential media relationship is with Fox News host Sean Hannity. While guests on Fox & Friends speak to the president through the cameras, Hannity and Trump are so close that White House staffers refer to the Fox host as Trump’s “unofficial chief of staff.” In personal meetings and late-night phone calls, the Fox host frequently encourages the president to act on his worst and most destructive impulses. Trump, in turn, serves as an unofficial producer to Hannity’s show, regularly watching the program, encouraging his supporters to tune in, and reportedly floating segment ideas during their frequent conversations.

That relationship has been very good for Hannity, whose show became the most-watched cable news program last year. And Hannity’s rise has aided Trump by providing an enormous platform to advance a dangerous idea to the Republican base: that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is a sprawling conspiracy that justifies the president using any means -- including trials of the law enforcement officials who initiated the probe -- to stop it.

Hannity’s success has spawned a legion of right-wing imitators who use similarly dire language to hype the menace they say Mueller poses and to prime their audience to support the frightening actions they are encouraging Trump to take in response. …

Understanding the president's increasingly hyperaggressive response to the Mueller investigation requires a familiarity with the paranoid conspiracy theory that Hannity and his compatriots have constructed over the past year.

Over the past few weeks, my colleague Shelby Jamerson and I reviewed more than 2,700 pages of Hannity transcripts from the 254 episodes that aired between Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017, and May 16, 2018. Those episodes included 487 segments substantially devoted to the probe -- nearly two segments per episode. Hannity featured the story in his program’s opening segment 152 times, roughly three times each week.

…

To watch Hannity’s broadcast over the last year is to plunge into a strikingly paranoid vision of America today.

“A soft coup is underway right here in the United States of America,” Hannity said last June, “in an attempt to overturn November's election results and forcibly remove a duly elected president from office, sinister forces quickly aligning in what is becoming now, in my mind, a clear and present danger.”

Specifically, Hannity claims that the leadership of the FBI, aided by Democrats and the media, conspired during the 2016 election to exonerate Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton of the crimes they knew she had committed. At the same time, Hannity alleges that this cabal fabricated the narrative that Trump had colluded with Russia in order to prevent him from becoming president -- and that once Trump won the election despite these efforts to manipulate voters, his enemies continued to try to drive him from office. This narrative bears little relationship to reality: In the months leading up to the election, the FBI kept its investigation into whether the Trump campaign collaborated with the Kremlin’s effort to support his candidacy a secret while repeatedly calling attention to the Clinton probe, likely costing the Democrat the presidency.

Nonetheless, the sinister cabal of Democrats, journalists, and the “deep state” are the villains of this story. And in Hannity’s telling, the host and his rotating cast of guests are the only thing standing between Trump and his annihilation.

Hannity presents his show as the only venue willing to tell the truth about the story, casting reporting about Trump, Russia, and the 2016 election not as the result of serious journalism, but as part of a plot against the president.

The Fox host is adamant that any suggestion of collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials is the stuff of “black-helicopter, tinfoil-hat conspiracy.” Instead, Hannity claims that the “real collusion” happened between Russia and the Democrats, in the form of various broadly discredited pseudoscandals.

Hannity’s attempts to exonerate Trump are disturbing enough. But it’s his attempts to turn his audience against a set of new enemies that are truly dangerous.

In Hannity’s telling, Mueller, a Republican who served as a Marine officer during the Vietnam War and was first appointed to run the FBI by George W. Bush, is running a duplicitous “witch hunt.” His team is composed of vicious Democratic partisans, and his personal relationship with former FBI Director James Comey is both suspect and actually illegal.

This counternarrative of Hannity’s, repeated ad nauseum over the months, is designed to lead his audience inexorably to a simple conclusion: “Mueller's probe is tainted. Hillary is a criminal.” And Trump is justified in taking drastic action, including shutting down the investigation into his activities and then prosecuting and jailing his opponents, to protect himself.

Hannity’s story is in step with the president’s own crude preferences and biases. Trump prefers an authoritarian model for law enforcement, in which the job of the Justice Department is to protect him and punish his enemies. Hannity’s show is providing Trump with both constant encouragement to act on those impulses, and is a powerful propaganda tool urging his base to support him if he does. Hannity benefits in turn from his private access to the president and Trump’s public displays of support for his program.

…

This study reveals the four prongs of the overarching strategy Hannity has followed over the past year: delegitimizing the press, defending Trump from collusion claims, and creating a counternarrative that targets the investigators. All of those build to the authoritarian endgame Hannity's conspiracy theory is courting -- which is supported by the series of guests who help sell his tale to the Fox audience.

… Building on decades of conservative animus for journalists, Hannity tells his audience that the media are working hand in hand with other Trump enemies; that their reporting is hostile and should not be believed; and that only Hannity provides an accurate take on the investigation.

...

… Hannity – like Trump himself -- has made “NO COLLUSION” his mantra, regularly denouncing what he terms “black helicopter, tinfoil hat conspiracy theories about so-called Trump-Russia collusion.” He and his guests argued that point in 191 of the broadcast’s segments on the Mueller probe, 39 percent of the total.

…

Hannity … has repeatedly invoked the dossier assembled by a former British intelligence officer and funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee as evidence that Clinton and other Democrats were “spreading propaganda, Russian propaganda, misinformation and outright lies to the American people.” The dossier cited troubling links between the Trump team and the Kremlin, and FBI investigators analyzed it in the stages of the probe alongside a host of other sources pointing to the same conclusion. Under Hannity’s warped argument, because the dossier cited interviews with Russian sources, it is itself the product of “real” collusion.

…

Having told his audience that, unlike the Democrats, the president and his associates did nothing wrong, Hannity needs to provide his viewers with an explanation for why the investigation is continuing. His explanation is that “deep state” forces -- first at the FBI and Justice Department during the 2016 election and the first months of the Trump administration, and later on Mueller’s team -- have engaged in a broad conspiracy to destroy Trump. Hannity describes this plot as “the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history” and “a direct threat to this American republic.”

In at least 81 segments, Hannity and his compatriots described the president as a victim of Mueller’s “witch hunt.” Making this task harder: Mueller, whose appointment as special counsel drew bipartisan praise, is a lifelong Republican. The Fox host has settled for invective, saying the special counsel is “as corrupt as they come, he doesn't seem to care about truth, doesn't care about facts, doesn't care about evidence. He doesn't care about being fair. He doesn't care that he's biased.” Hannity’s basis for these claims? Bogus claims about “conflicts of interest” he says Mueller and his team have, an attack Hannity and his guests have levied in 140 segments, 29 percent of the total.

Among the alleged conflicts Hannity has said call for the special counsel’s removal: Mueller’s purportedly close relationship with fired FBI Director James Comey, and the fact that some of the lawyers working for the Republican special counsel are registered Democrats, have donated to Democratic politicians, or have worked for progressive organizations. All of these supposedly sinister connections have been debunked by actual reporters or ethics experts with greater knowledge of the law and civil service rules, and more genuine interest in seeing them enforced, than Hannity can claim to possess.

...

But it’s not enough to simply ensure that the president and his allies cannot be punished if they committed crimes. Hannity is paving the way for another chilling action: the prosecution of Trump’s political enemies. …

… night after night, Hannity rants that Trump has been treated unfairly compared to Clinton, whom he paints as a dangerous criminal still at large. Over the course of the study, Hannity and his guests accused Clinton of crimes in 218 segments, an incredible 45 percent of all segments on the investigation. While the FBI investigated Clinton’s use of a private email server and recommended no charges against her, Hannity’s cohort is convinced that she is guilty of numerous crimes. “I want Hillary prosecuted because she committed felonies,” Hannity said in June. “That's just a fact. And if we deny that, then there's not equal justice under the law.” Eleven months later, he declared: “Mueller's probe is tainted. Hillary is a criminal. It all begins with Hillary Clinton.”

…

“People need to be exposed,” he explained in March. “Crimes were committed at the highest levels, and people in the end need to go to jail. The full story needs to come out. You deserve that and so much more from the people that are supposed to serve you in government.” Only a second special counsel, Hannity claims, can get to the bottom of all these crimes and ensure “justice and the rule of law in this country” (Gertz 1-10).

***

Kaiser polled people on whether or not they believed seven widely-circulated untruths about the virus, among them that the government is exaggerating the number of deaths attributable to the coronavirus, hiding reports of deaths caused by vaccines or that the vaccines can cause infertility, contain a microchip or can change DNA.

For people who most trusted network or local television news, NPR, CNN or MSNBC, between 11% and 16% said they believed four or more of those untrue statements, or weren't sure about what was true.

For Fox News viewers, 36% either believed in or were unsure about four or more false statements, Kaiser said. It was 46% for Newsmax viewers and 37% for those who said they trusted One America Network News.

The most widely-believed falsehood is about the government exaggerating COVID deaths. Kaiser said 60% of Americans either believe that or said they didn't know whether or not it was true (Bauder 2).

Fox News has long endured criticism for its coverage of the coronavirus during the early stages of the outbreak, with Sean Hannity calling the disease a hoax, Trish Reagan, another host, claiming the outbreak was a fiction invented by Democrats to attack the president and a litany of hosts downplaying the deadly and contagious disease by comparing it favorably with the common cold or the seasonal flu.

…

Reporting by the New York Times indicates that for two weeks in late February and early March [2020], when the pandemic began to take off in the United States, Fox News was more focused on providing cover for Donald Trump’s posture on the issue than the dissemination of the facts.

Fox News personalities like Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Jesse Waters were downplaying the disease, even as executives introduced disinfectant cleaning into their office and placed hand sanitizer conspicuously around the building, according to the story (Fox 2).

In the right-wing media universe, … the commotion over the coronavirus is hardly a crisis for the White House. Instead, it’s just another biased attack on a president from the usual haters.

…

Sean Hannity, at the top of his Fox News program on Thursday, attributed the worries over the coronavirus to a fear campaign led by “the media mob and the Democratic extreme radical socialist party.”

“They’re now sadly politicizing and actually weaponizing an infectious disease, in what is basically just the latest effort to bludgeon President Trump,” Mr. Hannity declared. “Many on the left are now all rooting for corona to wreak havoc in the United States. Why? To score cheap, repulsive political points.” (Mr. Hannity averages more than three million viewers a night, the biggest audience on cable news.)

One Hannity guest had the temerity to dissent — sort of. Geraldo Rivera, a Fox News regular, agreed with Mr. Hannity’s contention that Democrats had sought to arouse fear. But he told Mr. Hannity that “our friend, President Trump,” had not handled the situation ideally.

The president “was too cool for school,” Mr. Rivera said. “I think it would have been better if he were more energetic, more pointed and forceful —”

Before he could finish his thought, he was interrupted by Mr. Hannity and another guest, the Trump loyalist Dan Bongino, who quickly rebuked his colleague.

“That’s a horrible analysis, Geraldo,” Mr. Bongino said (Grynbaum and Abrams 1, 5).

[July 2021] Fox News anchor Sean Hannity has urged his viewers to 'take Covid seriously' - but later insisted he is not a doctor and won't 'tell people what to do'.

During his show on Monday night, Hannity made a point of speaking directly to his audience regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

'I can't say it enough. Enough people have died. We don't need any more death. Research like crazy. Talk to your doctor, your doctors, medical professionals you trust based on your unique medical history, your current medical condition, and you and your doctor make a very important decision for your own safety,' he began.

'Take it seriously. You also have a right to medical privacy, doctor-patient confidentiality is also important. And it absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science, I believe in the science of vaccination,' Hannity concluded.

In an accompanying tweet, Hannity repeated his plea once again but would not go as far as to suggest people get vaccinated, noting that he was 'NOT a doctor.' (Gordon 2).

Works cited:

Bauder, David. “Study: Fox Viewers More Likely To Believe COVID Falsehoods.” US News, November 10, 2021. Net. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-11-10/study-fox-viewers-more-likely-to-believe-covid-falsehoods

Gertz, Matt.Study: "Sean Hannity Spent the Last Year Laying the Groundwork for an Authoritarian Response to the Russia Probe.” Media Matters, May 23, 2018. Net. https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/study-sean-hannity-spent-last-year-laying-groundwork-authoritarian-response-russia

Gordon, James. “Fox News host Sean Hannity Urges Viewers To 'Take COVID Seriously' and Says He 'Believes in the Science of Vaccination'. Dailymail.com, July 20, 2021. Net. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9805145/Fox-News-Sean-Hannity-tells-viewers-Covid-seriously-people-died-not-Dr.html

Grynbaum, Michael M. and Abrams, Rachel. “Right-Wing Media Says Virus Fears Were Whipped Up to Hurt Trump.” The New York Times, updated March 2, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/business/media/coronavirus-right-wing-media.html

“Fox News Faces Lawsuit over Its Coronavirus Coverage.” missoulacurrent.com. Net. https://missoulacurrent.com/government/2020/04/fox-news-coronavirus/?print=print

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