Harold Titus's Blog, page 4
February 20, 2022
The Amoralists -- Tucker Carlson, Part Two -- CNN to Fox News
To hear Carlson tell it, he stumbled into television the same way he wandered into journalism, because it was quick, easy, and they’d take him. In his 2003 book Politics, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, Carlson recounts that his first television appearance happened because he came home early from lunch.
I was heading back to my desk with a take-out hot dog one afternoon when I ran into the receptionist. She asked me what I knew about the O.J. trial. My instinct was to answer honestly (“just about nothing”), but for some reason I caught myself. I asked her why she wanted to know. Well, she explained, Dan Rather’s booker just called looking for an O.J. expert to go on 48 Hours tonight. Everyone else is still at lunch. Can you do it?
After that, Carlson was on TV regularly as a talking head. Five years later, in 2000, he was asked to go on CNN to give commentary after the Lieberman-Cheney debate. That analysis launched the CNN show The Spin Room, co-hosted by Carlson and Bill Press. It aired at 1 in the morning, then 11 and 11:30 at night, before finally coming to rest at 10:30. The show was short-lived, and little-loved: “Press is a hopeless, dithering wimp who makes Carlson’s bow-tied twit look like The Rock,” wrote a critic in Entertainment Weekly in 2001. “Between them, Carlson and Press would be hard-pressed to win a debate with network weatherman Flip Spiceland over whether or not the sun is out in Atlanta.”
But somehow, despite the cancellation of his debut show, Carlson’s career as player in political TV was on. In 2001, Carlson was asked to co-host Crossfire with Paul Begala.
He also hosted a weekly public affairs show on PBS, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. The most notable moment of Crossfire, the one everyone remembers, aired on October 15, 2004. That was the day Jon Stewart came on Crossfire and called Tucker Carlson a dick.
It’s an infamous moment in cable news history. Carlson and Begala seem to think Stewart is there to promote his book, but he immediately begins criticizing the show. Any attempt by the co-hosts to retake control comes off as weak and wheedling. They try to bait him, but Stewart won’t budge. He defends himself as saying he’s just entertainment, a defense that in hindsight feels misleading considering the way The Daily Show changed news and comedy. In response, Carlson stutters. He’s defensive. He laughs nervously, an early sign of what would become a trademark tic.
“Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America,” Stewart begs Begala and Carlson. The conversation escalates from there, with Stewart lecturing the duo on their cable news theater which masquerades as journalism.
Begala says little. It’s Carlson who tries to parry Stewart’s blows. But Stewart does what Carlson would later learn to do so well, he comes out of the gate with an impossible line of questioning and a disingenuous defense.
At one point, Carlson notes, “I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion.”
Stewart doesn’t miss a beat. “You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.”
Carlson clearly still has scars from the exchange. “Jon Stewart was far more popular than I was,” he says, “and so he was recorded as having won the argument. But I never understood what the argument was.”
The argument, of course, was that Carlson was hurting America with his rhetoric. And in some ways, that’s still the argument. The power dynamic has changed. And now, Carlson is the one making people stutter defensively.
Though Stewart has long been off the air, the parallels between the two men still resonate.
Today on his show, Carlson often comes right out of the gate with impossible and leading questions, like Stewart did. … In 2004, people saw Stewart as a rogue, a truth teller, someone who skewered both sides equally. Carlson sees himself the same way. “I think you’ll find a lot of people who say I’m repugnant or expired or whatever, but I don’t think I’m fake.”
Crossfire was cancelled a few months after the Stewart appearance, and former CNN President Jon Klein tells CJR that yes, he did agree with Stewart. He canceled the show in order to change the culture at CNN. “The original premise that two intelligent people from opposite sides of the spectrum could shed some fascinating light on the issues of the day had devolved in a predictable Punch and Judy show.”
Then he goes even further. “Canceling Crossfire was one of the best decisions I made,” says Klein. In response to Klein, Carlson shot back, “I was long gone from CNN and employed at another network by the time Crossfire got canceled. But for the record Jon Klein is a small and dishonest person.”
For about a second, the moment marked a watershed for Carlson. He seemed to change. He got an MSNBC show and told people it would be different. He wouldn’t shout. He ditched the bow tie.
In a 2005 interview about his now-canceled MSNBC show, Carlson told Television Week, “This is not ever a show that will ever have guests debating each other. Ever. That is the form in cable news. We’re never doing that. Ever. That’s a worn-out format, and I am not going to do that…‘I’m right, you’re wrong.’ I hate that.” That same article described Carlson as saying “no” to shouting matches.
He then went on Dancing with the Stars and was immediately voted off (Lenz 6-7)
Tucker Carlson, the bow-tied conservative known best for his stint on CNN’s now-canceled “Crossfire,” returns to cable news today with a new prime-time show on rival cable channel MSNBC.
“The Situation With Tucker Carlson” features the commentator and a rotating panel -- for now, Rachel Maddow of Air America and radio talk-show host Jay Severin -- opining on up to 20 stories an hour in a rapid-fire, freewheeling format. The show will air at 9 p.m. weekdays on the East Coast, repeated at 10 p.m. PST.
Although the program will cover politics, Carlson said he will also delve into pop culture and a range of topics that he said did not fit into “Crossfire’s” right-left format.
“It will not be a stilted format,” said Carlson, who also has a weekly show on PBS that ends this month. “If someone perceived as liberal wants to say something perceived as conservative, amen” (Gold 1).
He also hosted a late-afternoon weekday wrap-up for the network during the 2006 Winter Games. He appeared live from Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and reported the aftermaths of the Virginia Tech shooting and Johnson Space Center shooting in 2007 (Wikipedia 3).
After MSNBC cancelled Carlson’s show, in 2008, he and his college roommate, former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel, launched a media start-up, The Daily Caller. The Caller was supposed to be a new kind of conservative outlet—thoughtful, responsible, researched.
They hired Megan Mulligan from The Guardian to run the day-to-day editorial operations, and for awhile at least, Carlson was hands on. He’d go to editorial meetings with note cards full of ideas.
But the site was probably doomed from the beginning. To start with, The Daily Caller was funded by conservative philanthropist Foster Friess, who is famous for telling Andrea Mitchell that in his day, “gals” used to clutch aspirin between their knees as a form of birth control. Editorially, Carlson insisted the site would be independent, and in March 2010, the Caller ran a story about RNC chair Michael Steele using party funds on a private plane and an evening at a bondage-themed nightclub. The story was poorly sourced and drew more skepticism than accolades.
When writer Mickey Kaus published an article criticizing Fox News, Carlson immediately removed it. Carlson had a contract with the network as a commentator and, according to Kaus, he said he couldn’t criticize Carlson’s employer. So much for independence. Kaus insists he respects Carlson’s decision and that it’s all “water under the bridge,” but the dream of a rogue outlet of hard-hitting, conservative journalism was never realized. And the site withered from there. Right now the site highlights sensationalist stories about “illegal aliens,” justifiable homicide, and a hit piece on Beto O’Rourke.
What The Daily Caller became, a former employee told me, was far different than what it was intended to be. “They used all the technology that told them who was reading the site and what they wanted. So, they gave the people what they wanted” (Lenz 9-14).
The Daily Caller pushed birtherism, it published [Dennis] O’Keefe’s lesser videos, it portrayed Trayvon Martin as a thug. It tried to take down Media Matters and Bob Menendez with shoddy “scoops” that quickly fell apart.
The site published several figures on the alt-right, and its deputy editor was forced to resign after it emerged he had written for a white supremacist publication under a pseudonym. The site was nothing like what Carlson claimed he intended it to be. But it flourished. And it also helped resuscitate his career. After years of seeking mainstream acceptance, Carlson stopped. But he did show a knack for driving the red meat culture war stories that fed the right-wing media ecosystem. And, in an era of growing frustration with RINOs and other Republican elites, Carlson also showed a knack for biting the hand that fed him—with one exception.
“I have two rules,” Carlson said in 2015 after he killed a piece critical of Fox News. “One is you can’t criticize the families of the people who work here. And the other rule is you can’t go after Fox. Only for one reason, not because they’re conservative or we agree with them [or] because they’re doing the Lord’s work. Nothing like that. It’s because I work there. I’m an anchor on Fox.”
In 2009, a year after his MSNBC show went up in flames, Carlson got another shot at Fox News—he began as a contributor and occasional guest host. His ascent was slow, but steady. By 2013, he was hosting Fox & Friends’ weekend hour. Three years later—eight years after his last bite at the apple—Carlson got his own show, not long after then-Fox News chief Roger Ailes brought him to the network.
During this period, Carlson’s meanness began to warp into cruelty. His racism and homophobia, long parts of his journalistic oeuvre, became even more pronounced. As he ditched the establishment GOP cloak, he leaned more and more heavily into his fratty side. Television helped it along, of course. His last award-winning magazine feature, a 2003 Esquire piece about traveling to Liberia with a group of Black preachers, prefigures the types of arguments that would appear again and again on his show. “The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me,” Carlson wrote. “I grew up feeling about as much connection to nineteenth-century slave owners as I did to bus drivers in Helsinki or astronomers in Tirana. We’re all capable of getting sunburned. That’s it.” …
...
Between 2006 and 2011, Carlson made numerous appearances on a radio show hosted by Bubba the Love Sponge, a Florida-based shock jock. Carlson repeatedly used racist and homophobic language. He lamented that “everyone’s embarrassed to be a white man” now, even though white men should get credit for “creating civilization and stuff.” Iraq, the invasion of which he had cheered on, was “a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys.” He questioned Barack Obama’s Blackness because he is of mixed-race parentage. He joked with Bubba about loving him “in a faggot way.” In another call, he joked about teen girls sexually experimenting at boarding school and referred to women as “pigs” and “whores.”
Many of these comments surfaced much later, but Carlson also rarely bothered to hide them: In 2007, on his MSNBC show, he boasted about beating up a gay man who made an advance on him in a public bathroom (Shephard 20-22).
After stints at CNN and MSNBC, Tucker Carlson is getting his pundit passport stamped by the third cable news network (and the most popular of the three), the Fox News Channel.
Mr. Carlson will be a paid contributor for Fox, appearing on programs to talk politics. Might the former CNN and MSNBC talk show host become a host of his own program on Fox, too?
“I’m doing whatever they want me to do,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview Friday.
Mr. Carlson, a prominent libertarian, worked at CNN for five years, mostly as a co-host of “Crossfire,” the now-defunct political debate show. In 2005 he moved to MSNBC, where he dropped his signature bow tie and anchored for three years until his program was canceled in March 2008. He was hired both times by Rick Kaplan, a former president of CNN and MSNBC who now produces the “CBS Evening News.”
During Mr. Carlson’s tenure, MSNBC’s evening programming moved gradually to the left. His former time slots, 6 and 9 p.m., are now occupied by two liberals, Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow.
“The network changed a lot,” Mr. Carlson said. “I’m not attacking it, but” — he paused — “they didn’t have a role for me.”
“It’s just a different network than it was when I joined,” he added. “Very different.” He emphasized that “they were always very nice to me.”
His slow-motion departure from MSNBC was completed in January when his contract expired. Mr. Carlson said he had long admired Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, and was excited to contribute to the network. His first appearance will be on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday morning, the day he turns 40.
“This is the very first thing I’m doing in my 40s other than shaving,” he joked (Stelter 1).
Over the last four years [2017-2021], as his Fox News show adopted more and more radical positions—vaccine skepticism, white nationalism, his growing support for illiberal and anti-democratic right-wing regimes around the world—many who were once in his orbit have wondered what happened to Tucker Carlson. That question has fueled countless magazine profiles and cocktail hour conversations.
The answer is perhaps less exciting than the question seems. Carlson is, in many ways, the same as he has ever been. He is whiny and petulant. He insists that he is a rebel, shucking elites of both parties and decrying phonies and partisans. But he advocates again and again only on behalf of whites, particularly well-heeled ones. He contradicts himself constantly and seems to have no fixed ideology at all, beyond a sense of racial solidarity. “Ultimately, I’m just not a guilty white person,” Carlson wrote for Esquire in 2003. Over the ensuing two decades, he has only gotten angrier and angrier at the suggestion he should feel guilty for being white and more insistent that groups advocating for Blacks or homosexuals or anyone who isn’t white exist solely to take what is rightfully his and—as he insists frequently on his television show—yours (Shephard 23).
When Bret Baier took over Fox News 'Special Report from Brit Hume in 2009, he told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that “Fox has a conservative reputation 'because of our opinion shows,' but that 'Special Report' and Shepard Smith's 7 p.m. newscast feature 'a straight-down-the-middle presentation.'”
Similarly, Baier told the Fresno Bee that his show is “about being true to our motto which is 'being fair and balanced.'”
“Straight-down-the-middle” and “fair and balanced” certainly don't apply to the guest make-up of Special Report's “all-star” panel. A review of the last three months of programming (April 12 to July 12, 66 editions) shows that 67.5% of Baier's panel guests are conservative. Just 10% are progressive. …
The Weekly Standard is prominently represented among the “all-stars.” 65.5% of all appearances are composed of people (Charles Krauthammer, Steve Hayes, Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and Fred Barnes) who appear on the masthead for the conservative publication.
Last October, the Los Angeles Times' James Rainey noted that Special Report frequently pits two conservatives against a third panelist that's less ideological, and that he “asked a Fox spokeswoman how this represented balance, and she said I seemed so set in my disapproval that it wasn't worth offering a rebuttal.”
Howard Kurtz noted on Monday that another “fair and balanced” Fox News broadcast, America's Newsroom, has bookings that “tilt markedly to the right” (Hananoki 1).
The Obama administration, which would seem to have its hands full with a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan, opened up a third front last week, this time with Fox News.
Until this point, the conflict had been mostly a one-sided affair, with Fox News hosts promoting tax day “tea parties” that focused protest on the new president, and more recently bringing down the presidential adviser Van Jones through rugged coverage that caught the administration, and other news organizations, off guard. During the health care debate, Fox News has put a megaphone to opponents, some of whom have advanced far-fetched theories about the impact of reform.
And even farther out on the edge, the network’s most visible star of the moment, Glenn Beck, has said the president has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”
Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.
…
… So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president (Carr 1-2).
Works cited:
Carr, David. “The Battle between the White House and Fox News.” New York Times, October 17, 2009. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/we...
Gold, Matea. “Tucker Carlson, Take 2.” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2005. Net. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...
Hananoki, Eric. “Special Report's “All-Star” Panel Is Overwhelmingly Conservative: 67% over Past 3 Months.” Media Matters, July 13, 2010. Net. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news...
Lenz, Lyz. “The Mystery of Tucker Carlson.” Columbia Journalism Review, September 5, 2018. Net. https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tucke...
Shephard, Alex. “How Tucker Carlson Lost it.” New Republic, September 16, 2021. Net https://newrepublic.com/article/16356...
Stelter, Brian. “Tucker Carlson Turns 40, Moves to Fox News.” New York Times, May 15, 2009. Net. https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_...
I was heading back to my desk with a take-out hot dog one afternoon when I ran into the receptionist. She asked me what I knew about the O.J. trial. My instinct was to answer honestly (“just about nothing”), but for some reason I caught myself. I asked her why she wanted to know. Well, she explained, Dan Rather’s booker just called looking for an O.J. expert to go on 48 Hours tonight. Everyone else is still at lunch. Can you do it?
After that, Carlson was on TV regularly as a talking head. Five years later, in 2000, he was asked to go on CNN to give commentary after the Lieberman-Cheney debate. That analysis launched the CNN show The Spin Room, co-hosted by Carlson and Bill Press. It aired at 1 in the morning, then 11 and 11:30 at night, before finally coming to rest at 10:30. The show was short-lived, and little-loved: “Press is a hopeless, dithering wimp who makes Carlson’s bow-tied twit look like The Rock,” wrote a critic in Entertainment Weekly in 2001. “Between them, Carlson and Press would be hard-pressed to win a debate with network weatherman Flip Spiceland over whether or not the sun is out in Atlanta.”
But somehow, despite the cancellation of his debut show, Carlson’s career as player in political TV was on. In 2001, Carlson was asked to co-host Crossfire with Paul Begala.
He also hosted a weekly public affairs show on PBS, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. The most notable moment of Crossfire, the one everyone remembers, aired on October 15, 2004. That was the day Jon Stewart came on Crossfire and called Tucker Carlson a dick.
It’s an infamous moment in cable news history. Carlson and Begala seem to think Stewart is there to promote his book, but he immediately begins criticizing the show. Any attempt by the co-hosts to retake control comes off as weak and wheedling. They try to bait him, but Stewart won’t budge. He defends himself as saying he’s just entertainment, a defense that in hindsight feels misleading considering the way The Daily Show changed news and comedy. In response, Carlson stutters. He’s defensive. He laughs nervously, an early sign of what would become a trademark tic.
“Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America,” Stewart begs Begala and Carlson. The conversation escalates from there, with Stewart lecturing the duo on their cable news theater which masquerades as journalism.
Begala says little. It’s Carlson who tries to parry Stewart’s blows. But Stewart does what Carlson would later learn to do so well, he comes out of the gate with an impossible line of questioning and a disingenuous defense.
At one point, Carlson notes, “I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion.”
Stewart doesn’t miss a beat. “You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.”
Carlson clearly still has scars from the exchange. “Jon Stewart was far more popular than I was,” he says, “and so he was recorded as having won the argument. But I never understood what the argument was.”
The argument, of course, was that Carlson was hurting America with his rhetoric. And in some ways, that’s still the argument. The power dynamic has changed. And now, Carlson is the one making people stutter defensively.
Though Stewart has long been off the air, the parallels between the two men still resonate.
Today on his show, Carlson often comes right out of the gate with impossible and leading questions, like Stewart did. … In 2004, people saw Stewart as a rogue, a truth teller, someone who skewered both sides equally. Carlson sees himself the same way. “I think you’ll find a lot of people who say I’m repugnant or expired or whatever, but I don’t think I’m fake.”
Crossfire was cancelled a few months after the Stewart appearance, and former CNN President Jon Klein tells CJR that yes, he did agree with Stewart. He canceled the show in order to change the culture at CNN. “The original premise that two intelligent people from opposite sides of the spectrum could shed some fascinating light on the issues of the day had devolved in a predictable Punch and Judy show.”
Then he goes even further. “Canceling Crossfire was one of the best decisions I made,” says Klein. In response to Klein, Carlson shot back, “I was long gone from CNN and employed at another network by the time Crossfire got canceled. But for the record Jon Klein is a small and dishonest person.”
For about a second, the moment marked a watershed for Carlson. He seemed to change. He got an MSNBC show and told people it would be different. He wouldn’t shout. He ditched the bow tie.
In a 2005 interview about his now-canceled MSNBC show, Carlson told Television Week, “This is not ever a show that will ever have guests debating each other. Ever. That is the form in cable news. We’re never doing that. Ever. That’s a worn-out format, and I am not going to do that…‘I’m right, you’re wrong.’ I hate that.” That same article described Carlson as saying “no” to shouting matches.
He then went on Dancing with the Stars and was immediately voted off (Lenz 6-7)
Tucker Carlson, the bow-tied conservative known best for his stint on CNN’s now-canceled “Crossfire,” returns to cable news today with a new prime-time show on rival cable channel MSNBC.
“The Situation With Tucker Carlson” features the commentator and a rotating panel -- for now, Rachel Maddow of Air America and radio talk-show host Jay Severin -- opining on up to 20 stories an hour in a rapid-fire, freewheeling format. The show will air at 9 p.m. weekdays on the East Coast, repeated at 10 p.m. PST.
Although the program will cover politics, Carlson said he will also delve into pop culture and a range of topics that he said did not fit into “Crossfire’s” right-left format.
“It will not be a stilted format,” said Carlson, who also has a weekly show on PBS that ends this month. “If someone perceived as liberal wants to say something perceived as conservative, amen” (Gold 1).
He also hosted a late-afternoon weekday wrap-up for the network during the 2006 Winter Games. He appeared live from Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and reported the aftermaths of the Virginia Tech shooting and Johnson Space Center shooting in 2007 (Wikipedia 3).
After MSNBC cancelled Carlson’s show, in 2008, he and his college roommate, former Dick Cheney aide Neil Patel, launched a media start-up, The Daily Caller. The Caller was supposed to be a new kind of conservative outlet—thoughtful, responsible, researched.
They hired Megan Mulligan from The Guardian to run the day-to-day editorial operations, and for awhile at least, Carlson was hands on. He’d go to editorial meetings with note cards full of ideas.
But the site was probably doomed from the beginning. To start with, The Daily Caller was funded by conservative philanthropist Foster Friess, who is famous for telling Andrea Mitchell that in his day, “gals” used to clutch aspirin between their knees as a form of birth control. Editorially, Carlson insisted the site would be independent, and in March 2010, the Caller ran a story about RNC chair Michael Steele using party funds on a private plane and an evening at a bondage-themed nightclub. The story was poorly sourced and drew more skepticism than accolades.
When writer Mickey Kaus published an article criticizing Fox News, Carlson immediately removed it. Carlson had a contract with the network as a commentator and, according to Kaus, he said he couldn’t criticize Carlson’s employer. So much for independence. Kaus insists he respects Carlson’s decision and that it’s all “water under the bridge,” but the dream of a rogue outlet of hard-hitting, conservative journalism was never realized. And the site withered from there. Right now the site highlights sensationalist stories about “illegal aliens,” justifiable homicide, and a hit piece on Beto O’Rourke.
What The Daily Caller became, a former employee told me, was far different than what it was intended to be. “They used all the technology that told them who was reading the site and what they wanted. So, they gave the people what they wanted” (Lenz 9-14).
The Daily Caller pushed birtherism, it published [Dennis] O’Keefe’s lesser videos, it portrayed Trayvon Martin as a thug. It tried to take down Media Matters and Bob Menendez with shoddy “scoops” that quickly fell apart.
The site published several figures on the alt-right, and its deputy editor was forced to resign after it emerged he had written for a white supremacist publication under a pseudonym. The site was nothing like what Carlson claimed he intended it to be. But it flourished. And it also helped resuscitate his career. After years of seeking mainstream acceptance, Carlson stopped. But he did show a knack for driving the red meat culture war stories that fed the right-wing media ecosystem. And, in an era of growing frustration with RINOs and other Republican elites, Carlson also showed a knack for biting the hand that fed him—with one exception.
“I have two rules,” Carlson said in 2015 after he killed a piece critical of Fox News. “One is you can’t criticize the families of the people who work here. And the other rule is you can’t go after Fox. Only for one reason, not because they’re conservative or we agree with them [or] because they’re doing the Lord’s work. Nothing like that. It’s because I work there. I’m an anchor on Fox.”
In 2009, a year after his MSNBC show went up in flames, Carlson got another shot at Fox News—he began as a contributor and occasional guest host. His ascent was slow, but steady. By 2013, he was hosting Fox & Friends’ weekend hour. Three years later—eight years after his last bite at the apple—Carlson got his own show, not long after then-Fox News chief Roger Ailes brought him to the network.
During this period, Carlson’s meanness began to warp into cruelty. His racism and homophobia, long parts of his journalistic oeuvre, became even more pronounced. As he ditched the establishment GOP cloak, he leaned more and more heavily into his fratty side. Television helped it along, of course. His last award-winning magazine feature, a 2003 Esquire piece about traveling to Liberia with a group of Black preachers, prefigures the types of arguments that would appear again and again on his show. “The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me,” Carlson wrote. “I grew up feeling about as much connection to nineteenth-century slave owners as I did to bus drivers in Helsinki or astronomers in Tirana. We’re all capable of getting sunburned. That’s it.” …
...
Between 2006 and 2011, Carlson made numerous appearances on a radio show hosted by Bubba the Love Sponge, a Florida-based shock jock. Carlson repeatedly used racist and homophobic language. He lamented that “everyone’s embarrassed to be a white man” now, even though white men should get credit for “creating civilization and stuff.” Iraq, the invasion of which he had cheered on, was “a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys.” He questioned Barack Obama’s Blackness because he is of mixed-race parentage. He joked with Bubba about loving him “in a faggot way.” In another call, he joked about teen girls sexually experimenting at boarding school and referred to women as “pigs” and “whores.”
Many of these comments surfaced much later, but Carlson also rarely bothered to hide them: In 2007, on his MSNBC show, he boasted about beating up a gay man who made an advance on him in a public bathroom (Shephard 20-22).
After stints at CNN and MSNBC, Tucker Carlson is getting his pundit passport stamped by the third cable news network (and the most popular of the three), the Fox News Channel.
Mr. Carlson will be a paid contributor for Fox, appearing on programs to talk politics. Might the former CNN and MSNBC talk show host become a host of his own program on Fox, too?
“I’m doing whatever they want me to do,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview Friday.
Mr. Carlson, a prominent libertarian, worked at CNN for five years, mostly as a co-host of “Crossfire,” the now-defunct political debate show. In 2005 he moved to MSNBC, where he dropped his signature bow tie and anchored for three years until his program was canceled in March 2008. He was hired both times by Rick Kaplan, a former president of CNN and MSNBC who now produces the “CBS Evening News.”
During Mr. Carlson’s tenure, MSNBC’s evening programming moved gradually to the left. His former time slots, 6 and 9 p.m., are now occupied by two liberals, Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow.
“The network changed a lot,” Mr. Carlson said. “I’m not attacking it, but” — he paused — “they didn’t have a role for me.”
“It’s just a different network than it was when I joined,” he added. “Very different.” He emphasized that “they were always very nice to me.”
His slow-motion departure from MSNBC was completed in January when his contract expired. Mr. Carlson said he had long admired Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, and was excited to contribute to the network. His first appearance will be on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday morning, the day he turns 40.
“This is the very first thing I’m doing in my 40s other than shaving,” he joked (Stelter 1).
Over the last four years [2017-2021], as his Fox News show adopted more and more radical positions—vaccine skepticism, white nationalism, his growing support for illiberal and anti-democratic right-wing regimes around the world—many who were once in his orbit have wondered what happened to Tucker Carlson. That question has fueled countless magazine profiles and cocktail hour conversations.
The answer is perhaps less exciting than the question seems. Carlson is, in many ways, the same as he has ever been. He is whiny and petulant. He insists that he is a rebel, shucking elites of both parties and decrying phonies and partisans. But he advocates again and again only on behalf of whites, particularly well-heeled ones. He contradicts himself constantly and seems to have no fixed ideology at all, beyond a sense of racial solidarity. “Ultimately, I’m just not a guilty white person,” Carlson wrote for Esquire in 2003. Over the ensuing two decades, he has only gotten angrier and angrier at the suggestion he should feel guilty for being white and more insistent that groups advocating for Blacks or homosexuals or anyone who isn’t white exist solely to take what is rightfully his and—as he insists frequently on his television show—yours (Shephard 23).
When Bret Baier took over Fox News 'Special Report from Brit Hume in 2009, he told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that “Fox has a conservative reputation 'because of our opinion shows,' but that 'Special Report' and Shepard Smith's 7 p.m. newscast feature 'a straight-down-the-middle presentation.'”
Similarly, Baier told the Fresno Bee that his show is “about being true to our motto which is 'being fair and balanced.'”
“Straight-down-the-middle” and “fair and balanced” certainly don't apply to the guest make-up of Special Report's “all-star” panel. A review of the last three months of programming (April 12 to July 12, 66 editions) shows that 67.5% of Baier's panel guests are conservative. Just 10% are progressive. …
The Weekly Standard is prominently represented among the “all-stars.” 65.5% of all appearances are composed of people (Charles Krauthammer, Steve Hayes, Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and Fred Barnes) who appear on the masthead for the conservative publication.
Last October, the Los Angeles Times' James Rainey noted that Special Report frequently pits two conservatives against a third panelist that's less ideological, and that he “asked a Fox spokeswoman how this represented balance, and she said I seemed so set in my disapproval that it wasn't worth offering a rebuttal.”
Howard Kurtz noted on Monday that another “fair and balanced” Fox News broadcast, America's Newsroom, has bookings that “tilt markedly to the right” (Hananoki 1).
The Obama administration, which would seem to have its hands full with a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan, opened up a third front last week, this time with Fox News.
Until this point, the conflict had been mostly a one-sided affair, with Fox News hosts promoting tax day “tea parties” that focused protest on the new president, and more recently bringing down the presidential adviser Van Jones through rugged coverage that caught the administration, and other news organizations, off guard. During the health care debate, Fox News has put a megaphone to opponents, some of whom have advanced far-fetched theories about the impact of reform.
And even farther out on the edge, the network’s most visible star of the moment, Glenn Beck, has said the president has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”
Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.
…
… So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president (Carr 1-2).
Works cited:
Carr, David. “The Battle between the White House and Fox News.” New York Times, October 17, 2009. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/we...
Gold, Matea. “Tucker Carlson, Take 2.” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2005. Net. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...
Hananoki, Eric. “Special Report's “All-Star” Panel Is Overwhelmingly Conservative: 67% over Past 3 Months.” Media Matters, July 13, 2010. Net. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news...
Lenz, Lyz. “The Mystery of Tucker Carlson.” Columbia Journalism Review, September 5, 2018. Net. https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tucke...
Shephard, Alex. “How Tucker Carlson Lost it.” New Republic, September 16, 2021. Net https://newrepublic.com/article/16356...
Stelter, Brian. “Tucker Carlson Turns 40, Moves to Fox News.” New York Times, May 15, 2009. Net. https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_...
February 17, 2022
The Amoralists; Tucker Carlson, Part One; Early Existence, Career
The question, What happened to Tucker Carlson? is worth answering. If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles and being hailed by some of the best editors in the business, to shouting about immigrants on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country, or at least to journalism, in 2018.
TUCKER MCNEAR SWANSON CARLSON was always going to be a journalist, if only through inertia and nepotism; the talent was a bonus. Carlson is the son of Dick Carlson, a media executive, who used to direct the Voice of America and is a former CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker was born in 1969, the older of two boys. Their mother, Lisa McNear Carlson, left the family when he was six. “Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all,” Carlson told The New Yorker in 2017 (Lenz 1).
Carlson's paternal grandparents were Richard Boynton and Dorothy Anderson, teenagers who placed his [Tucker’s] father at The Home for Little Wanderers orphanage where he was fostered by Carl Moberger, a Malden, near Boston, tannery worker of Swedish descent, and his wife Mainer Florence Moberger, and adopted at the age of two-years-old by upper-middle-class New Englanders, the Carlsons, an executive at the Winslow Brothers & Smith Tannery of Norwood (the oldest tannery in America) and his wife. …
In 1976, [Tucker] Carlson's parents divorced after the nine-year marriage reportedly "turned sour". Carlson's father was granted custody of Tucker and his brother. Carlson's mother left the family when he was six, wanting to pursue a "bohemian" lifestyle.
When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved Tucker and his brother to the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, and raised them there. Carlson attended La Jolla Country Day School and grew up in a home overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. His father owned property in Nevada, Vermont, and islands in Maine and Nova Scotia. In 1984, his father unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Republican Mayor Roger Hedgecock in the San Diego mayor race (Wikipedia 2-3).
When Tucker was 10, Dick remarried to Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune; her uncle was Senator J. William Fulbright. Carlson and his brother Buckley went to the Rhode Island private school St. George’s and, later, Tucker attended Trinity College, where, as he told the CJR in an interview, he spent his days mostly drunk. He graduated in 1992 and married his high school sweetheart, Susan Anderson.
Carlson applied to the CIA, but his application was denied, so he turned to journalism. “You should consider journalism,” his father told him. “They’ll take anybody.”
And they did.
Carlson began working for Policy Review as a fact-checker. “I ended up working for this magazine because the standards are so low,” he explains.
…
“I have all kinds of problems with authority and being told what to do,” he says. “I was not suited for that kind of work.”
…
... Carlson insists he … was motivated only by the needs of a growing family. He maintains that if someone handed him $5 million he wouldn’t have gotten out of bed. (And he’d be easy to believe, if he wasn’t, in fact, worth over $8 million, and hadn’t himself stood to inherit enough to keep him in a rotating series of beds until retirement.)
But it’s the story he’s sticking to. He had to do what he had to do. He didn’t have a choice. He has kids. DC has terrible public schools. His hands were tied. So, in addition to his staff positions, he took freelance jobs. He didn’t want to disappoint his family.
“I think this is true of almost everybody unless you happen to inherit a bunch of dough at a young age.” Carlson sounds cavalier as he says this, like the plight of sending kids to a private school in DC is the most relatable thing in history. …
…
… Carlson’s story is the story of the working man. He is, in this way, a Trumpish avatar—roguish, rich, independent, and confusing as hell. Despite his pedigree, or more likely because of it, Carlson has managed to become a vox populi of the deplorables. His show attracts an audience of 2.7 million people who see him as a voice of independent Americans. His book Ship of Fools, which rails against the liberal media establishment, is due out in October. The man’s voice and his power are only growing (Lenz 2-3).
His Republican father, former journalist Dick Carlson, now 59 and an Internet entrepreneur, was ambassador to the Seychelles, islands off the coast of Africa, during the Bush Administration. Tucker and younger brother Buckley, now 29 and a Washington policy analyst, were raised in La Jolla, Calif., by their father and stepmother, Patricia, 55, after their mother left home when Tucker was 6. Though a lackluster student, Carlson was an avid reader who had devoured War and Peace by age 10 and would become a boarding school debate team star at St. George’s School in Rhode Island, where he met and wooed the headmaster’s daughter Susie Andrews, now 31. “She was the cutest 10th grader in America,” he says. Says she: “There was a bounce in his walk. He was in his khaki pants and ribbon belt and I thought, even then, he seemed so optimistic and positive. (Dougherty 1).
His boarding school career was, by his own telling and everyone else’s, unremarkable but for one feature: He discovered debate and put it before everything else. Near the end of his time at the school, Carlson supposedly challenged any member of the faculty to debate him; no one accepted. Carlson then shipped off to Connecticut’s Trinity College, where he claims to have spent most of his time drunk. But this was the first PC era on campus, and, though an unremarkable student, Carlson was something of a conservative star. He thrilled at pissing off the hippies and lefties protesting on campus. When it was time to list his clubs and organizations in the school’s yearbook, Carlson cited membership in the nonexistent Dan White Society—a tribute to the murderer of Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician of the 1970s—and the Jesse Helms Foundation (which does exist). “His personality was not similar to what it is now; it was exactly the same,” his college roommate (and future Daily Caller co-founder) Neil Patel said in 2017. Already apparent then were the twin pillars of Carlson’s career in conservative media. On the one hand, there is conservative pedigree: the bow tie, the well-heeled family, the debates. On the other, a fratty, trolly, attention-seeking side (Shephard 10).
… In 1991, six months before graduating from Trinity, he asked his former headmaster for Susie’s hand in marriage. “All very 19th-century,” he says, “but a good thing to do.” Today [2000] the couple live with their children—Lillie, 5, Buckley, 3, and Hopie, 1—in the 1906 farmhouse they renovated in Alexandria, Va., a short drive from Carlson’s office at the Standard, where he has worked since 1995. “He’s so imaginative with them,” says Susie about her husband, who reads to the children constantly and, each July 4th, teaches them the meaning of the Constitution by reading the Bill of Rights and setting off a firecracker as he recites each liberty. “It’s good not to take our freedoms for granted,” says Carlson, who further instills civic pride in his kids by flying an American flag in the front yard every day of the year. “Patriotism is so uncool, but they don’t know that” (Dougherty 2).
In February 2009, when he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Tucker Carlson was in the midst of an identity crisis. Five years earlier, he had been a victim of what was arguably the first viral takedown of the internet era. Jon Stewart, then at the height of his Daily Show fame, appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, told the hosts they were ruining the country, and singled out Carlson in particular as a “dick.” Crossfire limped along for three more months before being canceled. Carlson then spent the next four years in the wilderness, appearing on Dancing with the Stars and hosting Tucker, which was canceled for low ratings in early 2008, on MSNBC, still a year or two away from deciding it would be the liberal cable news network. In 2003, a fresh-faced 34-year-old Carlson had released a memoir, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites, which cataloged and celebrated his meteoric rise through the burgeoning world of cable news. Now, however, Carlson was on the verge of flaming out.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I lived here in the 1990s and I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations,” Carlson said in 2009, at Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel. “I saw many of those organizations prosper, and I saw some of them fail. And here’s the difference: The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth that conservatives need to deal with. I’m as conservative as any person in this room—I’m literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho, so I am not in any way going to take a second seat to anyone in this room ideologically.” …
“If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail,” Carlson said, his voice building to crescendo. “The New York Times is a liberal paper … but it’s also a paper that cares about whether they spell people’s names right; it’s a paper that cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.”
The audience booed. Then the heckling started. Carlson attempted to defend himself. “I’m merely saying that at the core of their news gathering is gathering news!” he yelped at one inaudible audience member. “Why aren’t there outlets that don’t just comment on the news, but dig it up and make it?”
…
… his journey to the top of conservative media began with that CPAC speech. There has always been a nastiness and racial grievance at the core of Carlson, but, for much of his early career, he also sought a degree of respectability. At the time, there was still a somewhat respectable conservative media in existence. Carlson’s wobbly ascent in right-wing media eerily reflects the gradual stripping away of that respectability, as well as its increasing radicalization. “You could argue that Tucker Carlson’s career has been a Tour de France of conservative media. He has literally hit all the stations of the cross,” former conservative blogger Matthew Sheffield told me. “But all that’s changed is the object of his cruelty. Whereas before he was more of an Atlas Shrugged kind of guy—screw the poor. Now he’s decided to change the focus to let’s keep out these goddamned minorities.”
A year after his CPAC speech, Carlson would take a stab at creating the type of hard news–focused outlet he described. When he launched The Daily Caller in 2010, he vowed that it would “primarily be a news site” with a straightforward approach to the news: “Find out what’s happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply.”
There wasn’t an audience. Within a few months, it was publishing fake news and outrage-driven commentary. The transformation of The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment of Carlson’s career, a period during which he learned his lesson. He never sought respectability again.
Carlson’s journalism career began on the respectable side of conservative journalism. He started out working for Policy Review, the journal then housed inside the Heritage Foundation, where he wrote sober, plodding pieces about conservative policy issues: the decline of Black public schools, the benefits of a private police force, and “HOW TO CLOSE DOWN A CRACK HOUSE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.”
After a brief sojourn as an op-ed writer at the Little Rock–based Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Carlson joined the nascent Weekly Standard, the Murdoch-owned opinion journal whose early staff also included David Brooks. Carlson told The Washington Post in 1999 that he “begged” friends and colleagues to persuade Weekly Standard editor William Kristol to hire him. He was also in contention for a position at the Clinton conspiracy-obsessed American Spectator, but he worried he would “be written off as a wing nut” if he accepted a job there.
His career quickly took off. Much of Carlson’s Weekly Standard work is witty but doctrinaire—gossipy dispatches from Clinton’s scandal-plagued second term and Newt Gingrich’s sputtering speakership. …
… interspersed are the pieces that made Carlson’s reputation and turned him, practically overnight, into a star. His 1996 profile of future Crossfire co-host James Carville is the gold standard: a sly and devastating hit piece. Dubbed a “populist plutocrat,” Carlson’s Carville is, above all else, a hypocrite and a poseur: a craven check-casher who cares primarily about lining his own pockets and sucking down expensive wines. And yet, Carville is also oddly sympathetic—one senses Carlson recognizes a fellow traveler, another rakish opportunist who just happens to be playing for the other side.
In these pieces, we see the nucleus of Carlson’s later persona: He cares not one iota for public policy; what gets his blood up is hypocrisy, particularly when it comes from women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.
He continued writing for The Weekly Standard but became one of the most sought-after long-form magazine writers in the country, publishing pieces for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and, later, The New Republic.
In 1999, he profiled George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. Bush was running as “a compassionate conservative,” a Christian of deep faith, and a moral leader who could lift the country out of the debauched Clinton years. Carlson’s profile was glowing—mostly. But he also caught Bush’s naughty, frat boy side: He quotes the Texas governor saying “fuck,” over and over again, something Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, went to great lengths to deny. More chillingly, Carlson also noted Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a recently executed death row inmate in Texas: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”
…
Whether he was top talent or not, Carlson’s magazine writing career was over almost as soon as it began. While he was rising through the ranks in Washington, befriending liberal and conservative editors along the way, he was also becoming a television star.
As a writer, Carlson had a gift for irony and for bringing out stark, but often submerged, truths about his subjects. He was a bomb-thrower—he clearly idolized both Christopher Hitchens and Hunter S. Thompson—but the smug 15-year-old debater and “Dan White Society” member was also cloaked. Carlson relished the revealing of unsavory details about his subjects, but his brash and glib side was largely smothered by the nature of the assignments.
Television brought out the worst in Carlson—and it made him an even bigger star.
Carlson described his break into TV as a lucky one: “If O.J. Simpson hadn’t murdered his wife, I probably wouldn’t be working in television,” he wrote. CBS needed pundits to cover the O.J. trial, and Carlson answered the call; he quickly became a cable news regular, before hosting his own debate show on CNN with liberal Bill Press, beginning in 2000. That show was a disaster—Carlson was still figuring out what worked on TV—and it was quickly canceled. But the bow-tied Carlson had found a home at CNN, which quickly slotted him in as the fratty, well-heeled Republican on Crossfire, where he would shout at liberals Paul Begala and James Carville every afternoon. Carlson, as ever, understood the assignment: He was there to bark and bicker and to gleefully represent Team Red (Shephard 8-15).
Works cited:
Dougherty, Steve. “Meet Mister Right.” People, November 6, 2000. Net. https://people.com/archive/meet-miste...
Lenz, Lyz. “The Mystery of Tucker Carlson.” Columbia Journalism Review, September 5, 2018. Net. https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tucke...
Shephard, Alex. “How Tucker Carlson Lost it.” New Republic, September 16, 2021. Net https://newrepublic.com/article/16356...
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_...
TUCKER MCNEAR SWANSON CARLSON was always going to be a journalist, if only through inertia and nepotism; the talent was a bonus. Carlson is the son of Dick Carlson, a media executive, who used to direct the Voice of America and is a former CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker was born in 1969, the older of two boys. Their mother, Lisa McNear Carlson, left the family when he was six. “Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all,” Carlson told The New Yorker in 2017 (Lenz 1).
Carlson's paternal grandparents were Richard Boynton and Dorothy Anderson, teenagers who placed his [Tucker’s] father at The Home for Little Wanderers orphanage where he was fostered by Carl Moberger, a Malden, near Boston, tannery worker of Swedish descent, and his wife Mainer Florence Moberger, and adopted at the age of two-years-old by upper-middle-class New Englanders, the Carlsons, an executive at the Winslow Brothers & Smith Tannery of Norwood (the oldest tannery in America) and his wife. …
In 1976, [Tucker] Carlson's parents divorced after the nine-year marriage reportedly "turned sour". Carlson's father was granted custody of Tucker and his brother. Carlson's mother left the family when he was six, wanting to pursue a "bohemian" lifestyle.
When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved Tucker and his brother to the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, and raised them there. Carlson attended La Jolla Country Day School and grew up in a home overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. His father owned property in Nevada, Vermont, and islands in Maine and Nova Scotia. In 1984, his father unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Republican Mayor Roger Hedgecock in the San Diego mayor race (Wikipedia 2-3).
When Tucker was 10, Dick remarried to Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune; her uncle was Senator J. William Fulbright. Carlson and his brother Buckley went to the Rhode Island private school St. George’s and, later, Tucker attended Trinity College, where, as he told the CJR in an interview, he spent his days mostly drunk. He graduated in 1992 and married his high school sweetheart, Susan Anderson.
Carlson applied to the CIA, but his application was denied, so he turned to journalism. “You should consider journalism,” his father told him. “They’ll take anybody.”
And they did.
Carlson began working for Policy Review as a fact-checker. “I ended up working for this magazine because the standards are so low,” he explains.
…
“I have all kinds of problems with authority and being told what to do,” he says. “I was not suited for that kind of work.”
…
... Carlson insists he … was motivated only by the needs of a growing family. He maintains that if someone handed him $5 million he wouldn’t have gotten out of bed. (And he’d be easy to believe, if he wasn’t, in fact, worth over $8 million, and hadn’t himself stood to inherit enough to keep him in a rotating series of beds until retirement.)
But it’s the story he’s sticking to. He had to do what he had to do. He didn’t have a choice. He has kids. DC has terrible public schools. His hands were tied. So, in addition to his staff positions, he took freelance jobs. He didn’t want to disappoint his family.
“I think this is true of almost everybody unless you happen to inherit a bunch of dough at a young age.” Carlson sounds cavalier as he says this, like the plight of sending kids to a private school in DC is the most relatable thing in history. …
…
… Carlson’s story is the story of the working man. He is, in this way, a Trumpish avatar—roguish, rich, independent, and confusing as hell. Despite his pedigree, or more likely because of it, Carlson has managed to become a vox populi of the deplorables. His show attracts an audience of 2.7 million people who see him as a voice of independent Americans. His book Ship of Fools, which rails against the liberal media establishment, is due out in October. The man’s voice and his power are only growing (Lenz 2-3).
His Republican father, former journalist Dick Carlson, now 59 and an Internet entrepreneur, was ambassador to the Seychelles, islands off the coast of Africa, during the Bush Administration. Tucker and younger brother Buckley, now 29 and a Washington policy analyst, were raised in La Jolla, Calif., by their father and stepmother, Patricia, 55, after their mother left home when Tucker was 6. Though a lackluster student, Carlson was an avid reader who had devoured War and Peace by age 10 and would become a boarding school debate team star at St. George’s School in Rhode Island, where he met and wooed the headmaster’s daughter Susie Andrews, now 31. “She was the cutest 10th grader in America,” he says. Says she: “There was a bounce in his walk. He was in his khaki pants and ribbon belt and I thought, even then, he seemed so optimistic and positive. (Dougherty 1).
His boarding school career was, by his own telling and everyone else’s, unremarkable but for one feature: He discovered debate and put it before everything else. Near the end of his time at the school, Carlson supposedly challenged any member of the faculty to debate him; no one accepted. Carlson then shipped off to Connecticut’s Trinity College, where he claims to have spent most of his time drunk. But this was the first PC era on campus, and, though an unremarkable student, Carlson was something of a conservative star. He thrilled at pissing off the hippies and lefties protesting on campus. When it was time to list his clubs and organizations in the school’s yearbook, Carlson cited membership in the nonexistent Dan White Society—a tribute to the murderer of Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician of the 1970s—and the Jesse Helms Foundation (which does exist). “His personality was not similar to what it is now; it was exactly the same,” his college roommate (and future Daily Caller co-founder) Neil Patel said in 2017. Already apparent then were the twin pillars of Carlson’s career in conservative media. On the one hand, there is conservative pedigree: the bow tie, the well-heeled family, the debates. On the other, a fratty, trolly, attention-seeking side (Shephard 10).
… In 1991, six months before graduating from Trinity, he asked his former headmaster for Susie’s hand in marriage. “All very 19th-century,” he says, “but a good thing to do.” Today [2000] the couple live with their children—Lillie, 5, Buckley, 3, and Hopie, 1—in the 1906 farmhouse they renovated in Alexandria, Va., a short drive from Carlson’s office at the Standard, where he has worked since 1995. “He’s so imaginative with them,” says Susie about her husband, who reads to the children constantly and, each July 4th, teaches them the meaning of the Constitution by reading the Bill of Rights and setting off a firecracker as he recites each liberty. “It’s good not to take our freedoms for granted,” says Carlson, who further instills civic pride in his kids by flying an American flag in the front yard every day of the year. “Patriotism is so uncool, but they don’t know that” (Dougherty 2).
In February 2009, when he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Tucker Carlson was in the midst of an identity crisis. Five years earlier, he had been a victim of what was arguably the first viral takedown of the internet era. Jon Stewart, then at the height of his Daily Show fame, appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, told the hosts they were ruining the country, and singled out Carlson in particular as a “dick.” Crossfire limped along for three more months before being canceled. Carlson then spent the next four years in the wilderness, appearing on Dancing with the Stars and hosting Tucker, which was canceled for low ratings in early 2008, on MSNBC, still a year or two away from deciding it would be the liberal cable news network. In 2003, a fresh-faced 34-year-old Carlson had released a memoir, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites, which cataloged and celebrated his meteoric rise through the burgeoning world of cable news. Now, however, Carlson was on the verge of flaming out.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I lived here in the 1990s and I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations,” Carlson said in 2009, at Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel. “I saw many of those organizations prosper, and I saw some of them fail. And here’s the difference: The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth that conservatives need to deal with. I’m as conservative as any person in this room—I’m literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho, so I am not in any way going to take a second seat to anyone in this room ideologically.” …
“If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail,” Carlson said, his voice building to crescendo. “The New York Times is a liberal paper … but it’s also a paper that cares about whether they spell people’s names right; it’s a paper that cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.”
The audience booed. Then the heckling started. Carlson attempted to defend himself. “I’m merely saying that at the core of their news gathering is gathering news!” he yelped at one inaudible audience member. “Why aren’t there outlets that don’t just comment on the news, but dig it up and make it?”
…
… his journey to the top of conservative media began with that CPAC speech. There has always been a nastiness and racial grievance at the core of Carlson, but, for much of his early career, he also sought a degree of respectability. At the time, there was still a somewhat respectable conservative media in existence. Carlson’s wobbly ascent in right-wing media eerily reflects the gradual stripping away of that respectability, as well as its increasing radicalization. “You could argue that Tucker Carlson’s career has been a Tour de France of conservative media. He has literally hit all the stations of the cross,” former conservative blogger Matthew Sheffield told me. “But all that’s changed is the object of his cruelty. Whereas before he was more of an Atlas Shrugged kind of guy—screw the poor. Now he’s decided to change the focus to let’s keep out these goddamned minorities.”
A year after his CPAC speech, Carlson would take a stab at creating the type of hard news–focused outlet he described. When he launched The Daily Caller in 2010, he vowed that it would “primarily be a news site” with a straightforward approach to the news: “Find out what’s happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply.”
There wasn’t an audience. Within a few months, it was publishing fake news and outrage-driven commentary. The transformation of The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment of Carlson’s career, a period during which he learned his lesson. He never sought respectability again.
Carlson’s journalism career began on the respectable side of conservative journalism. He started out working for Policy Review, the journal then housed inside the Heritage Foundation, where he wrote sober, plodding pieces about conservative policy issues: the decline of Black public schools, the benefits of a private police force, and “HOW TO CLOSE DOWN A CRACK HOUSE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.”
After a brief sojourn as an op-ed writer at the Little Rock–based Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Carlson joined the nascent Weekly Standard, the Murdoch-owned opinion journal whose early staff also included David Brooks. Carlson told The Washington Post in 1999 that he “begged” friends and colleagues to persuade Weekly Standard editor William Kristol to hire him. He was also in contention for a position at the Clinton conspiracy-obsessed American Spectator, but he worried he would “be written off as a wing nut” if he accepted a job there.
His career quickly took off. Much of Carlson’s Weekly Standard work is witty but doctrinaire—gossipy dispatches from Clinton’s scandal-plagued second term and Newt Gingrich’s sputtering speakership. …
… interspersed are the pieces that made Carlson’s reputation and turned him, practically overnight, into a star. His 1996 profile of future Crossfire co-host James Carville is the gold standard: a sly and devastating hit piece. Dubbed a “populist plutocrat,” Carlson’s Carville is, above all else, a hypocrite and a poseur: a craven check-casher who cares primarily about lining his own pockets and sucking down expensive wines. And yet, Carville is also oddly sympathetic—one senses Carlson recognizes a fellow traveler, another rakish opportunist who just happens to be playing for the other side.
In these pieces, we see the nucleus of Carlson’s later persona: He cares not one iota for public policy; what gets his blood up is hypocrisy, particularly when it comes from women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.
He continued writing for The Weekly Standard but became one of the most sought-after long-form magazine writers in the country, publishing pieces for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and, later, The New Republic.
In 1999, he profiled George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. Bush was running as “a compassionate conservative,” a Christian of deep faith, and a moral leader who could lift the country out of the debauched Clinton years. Carlson’s profile was glowing—mostly. But he also caught Bush’s naughty, frat boy side: He quotes the Texas governor saying “fuck,” over and over again, something Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, went to great lengths to deny. More chillingly, Carlson also noted Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a recently executed death row inmate in Texas: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”
…
Whether he was top talent or not, Carlson’s magazine writing career was over almost as soon as it began. While he was rising through the ranks in Washington, befriending liberal and conservative editors along the way, he was also becoming a television star.
As a writer, Carlson had a gift for irony and for bringing out stark, but often submerged, truths about his subjects. He was a bomb-thrower—he clearly idolized both Christopher Hitchens and Hunter S. Thompson—but the smug 15-year-old debater and “Dan White Society” member was also cloaked. Carlson relished the revealing of unsavory details about his subjects, but his brash and glib side was largely smothered by the nature of the assignments.
Television brought out the worst in Carlson—and it made him an even bigger star.
Carlson described his break into TV as a lucky one: “If O.J. Simpson hadn’t murdered his wife, I probably wouldn’t be working in television,” he wrote. CBS needed pundits to cover the O.J. trial, and Carlson answered the call; he quickly became a cable news regular, before hosting his own debate show on CNN with liberal Bill Press, beginning in 2000. That show was a disaster—Carlson was still figuring out what worked on TV—and it was quickly canceled. But the bow-tied Carlson had found a home at CNN, which quickly slotted him in as the fratty, well-heeled Republican on Crossfire, where he would shout at liberals Paul Begala and James Carville every afternoon. Carlson, as ever, understood the assignment: He was there to bark and bicker and to gleefully represent Team Red (Shephard 8-15).
Works cited:
Dougherty, Steve. “Meet Mister Right.” People, November 6, 2000. Net. https://people.com/archive/meet-miste...
Lenz, Lyz. “The Mystery of Tucker Carlson.” Columbia Journalism Review, September 5, 2018. Net. https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tucke...
Shephard, Alex. “How Tucker Carlson Lost it.” New Republic, September 16, 2021. Net https://newrepublic.com/article/16356...
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_...
February 13, 2022
The Amoralists -- Sean Hannity, Part Six -- Unhinged
Transcript excerpts from Hannity’s TV show January 7, 2022.
I think the vax, don't vax debate is over. There's nothing that Biden, Fauci, Kamala Harris, Walensky, any of them are going to say that's going to change people's minds. There are people willing to lose their salary, their benefits, even their pensions because they believe so strongly that they don't want it.
You agree or disagree, that's up to you. It doesn't matter. That's the reality in my view.
Now, these mandates will result in more workers quitting. We had four and a half million in November alone. That means more staff shortages, skyrocketing costs for businesses, but the liberal justices on the court predictably, they seem less concerned with the Constitution and all the negative consequences, more worried about fueling more never-ending pandemic theater and restrictions and draconian shutdowns.
…
Will somebody tell Justice Sotomayor that fully vaccinated people are getting omicron just like they got delta, fully vaccinated people with boosters are getting omicron, fully vaccinated people with boosters and natural immunity and previous infections, they're getting it again.
…
All right. Now, also tonight, yet another dismal Biden jobs report as the economy in December, added only new jobs, sharply missing projections and estimates of 400,000 as the Biden agenda now continues to disincentivize work, continues to fail on the COVID response.
And because the same candidate who said he would shut down the virus is doing just the opposite, and more people die from COVID in 2021 than 2020, and Joe inherited three vaccines and monoclonal antibodies and he's run out of tests and he's run out of therapeutics. And there's no Operation Warp Speed, it's operation -- as Dr. Siegel has said -- snail speed.
Now, Biden is shutting down jobs. He's shutting down opportunity. And he's shutting down prosperity in this country and a 40-year high of inflation.
But I guess no one thought to tell Joe how bad the numbers were because he's still out there you know touting historic job growth. Maybe somebody should bring him up to speed.
…
All right. Joe, build back broke, sorry, is not going to work. Your results are historic. They're historically awful bad. In under a year, we've gone from energy independence and net exporter of energy, now you're begging OPEC over and over and over again and the Russians, you know, to produce more oil and we all see rising prices at the pump and we're all paying the price for your horrific policies.
Now, we've gone from American sovereignty and secure borders to all out an open borders catastrophe that's costing us a fortune. We've gone from safety and security abroad to a complete debacle and disaster and abandonment of fellow Americans in Afghanistan. We've gone from stable prices to, what, nearly a 40-year high in inflation, a supply chain mess that's not getting any better.
On the COVID front, as I said, we had three vaccines, therapeutics handed to you, monoclonal antibodies and you're not producing any of it and even running out of tests at this point. You fail to even get enough tests leading into the Christmas holiday when it was recommended. …
Now, the Trump administration gave all of this to you, three vaccines to market in record time, the ones that you keep pushing every day, and you can't even deliver the basic tests. You know, we're now in the third year of this pandemic.
After bragging about a foolproof plan, right, Joe? You're going to shut down the virus. I guess not.
Where's Operation Warp Speed for testing? Where's Operation Warp Speed for monoclonal antibodies and these antivirals? Where's warp speed for studies on natural immunity?
Now, Biden is being forced to face reality and being forced to confront his failures. …
I'll ask again, tonight, has Joe Biden done a single thing to improve the lives of all of you the American people? Can you name a single thing? If you can, write us.
Anyway, Biden campaign who's going to shut down the virus, beat COVID, he's done just the opposite. And now he's saying there's no federal solution. He campaigned on unity, but yet he demonizes half the country, suggesting there are threats to democracy. He campaigned on being a moderate yet he continues to double down on build back Bolshevik socialism, and an election takeover scheme, and changing the rules in the Senate and a power grab here, there and everywhere.
There's nothing moderate about Joe Biden. He's weak. He's frail. And he's not only cognitively struggling, but deteriorating right before our eyes cognitively day in and day out, an absolute far left extremist socialist failure.
…
What I'd like to give you [Rand Paul], I can't deliver. I would like to give you Fauci's resignation or Fauci being fired. That would be the perfect birthday present, because there's nobody that's been more wrong throughout this entire pandemic than him and more importantly, you exposed the great lie of Dr. Fauci and that is the knowledge and the money from the NIH going to fund the Wuhan virology lab.
…
You're also a medical doctor and you refused to get the vaccine because you had a natural immunity. Omicron now, this is what we're seeing as you know -- fully vaccinated people, they're getting omicron. Vaccinated with a booster, they're getting omicron. Vaccinated, booster, previous infections, they're getting re-infected. So nothing is working.
…
So there's no test, there's no monoclonals available apparently around the country, and these antiviral medicines that every doctor that I talk to raves about, I don't know much about them, are not available either from Pfizer and Merck.
...
Now, tonight, the Democrats, they continue to fuel mass hysteria over January the 6th. They don't want to talk about Biden's failed agenda and they push forward with the sham committee they're not interested in finding out what really happened and how to prevent it again. There is a way to do that.
The sole purpose of this political stunt is to smear slander and purge Donald Trump from the political world. Now, if this were truly a fair, bipartisan committee, Nancy Pelosi would not have kicked off the committee Jim Jordan and Jim Banks from serving on the committee. Instead now, well, they're left with seven Democrats, including the pathological liar, the biggest purveyor of election fraud in the history of this country himself, how ironic, Adam Schiff.
The last four years, he was pushing election fraud lies about Trump Russia collusion and conspiracy theories, repeating the lie that the election was stolen. Why is he on this committee?
And, of course, you have Trump hating Republicans, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, not appointed by Republicans. No, hand-picked by Nancy Pelosi.
…
Now, if they really wanted to conduct a fair investigation and do it the right way and find out what happened so it would never happen again, there's certain people they need to call.
We now had testimony on this program last night. In fact, Donald Trump signed off on 20,000 National Guard troops after the summer of 2020, and 574 riots, knowing big crowds are coming to D.C., knowing there's always usually a bad actor when you have a big crowd.
Anyway, they would call Nancy Pelosi. They would call the D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to testify and ask, why didn't you support Donald Trump's request for the National Guard and put greater security measures in place? …
If you want to prevent this from happening again and I do, you need to bring those people in. Where's the committee to investigate also the 574 riots in the summer of 2020? Those riots left dozens of Americans dead, more than a couple thousand police officers injured, many severely, over 2 billion in property damage, looting and arson.
And meanwhile, amid the left's hysteria yesterday, the mob, the media actually managed to set a new low for themselves. Let's see, comparing Biden's hateful divisive speech to the Gettysburg address, comparing it to the Holocaust. Some people on MSNBC, comparing it to 9/11, comparing it to Pearl Harbor. …
…
They [the Jan. 6 committee] could write their final report now, but they'll save it to a week before the midterms. I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I blame Trump, I blame Trump.
…
You know, I watch and in my humble opinion just as an observer and I've been very outspoken and polls now show a majority of the American people … agree with me that Joe's in a serious cognitive decline, and we're watching this. We see his failures, we see his slip-ups that are constant seems to be getting worse -- I don't know what's worse, if Joe or Kamala. (Fox 1-15).
Hannity’s Reactions to Criticism
Jon Stewart's return to the world of political commentary—a ten-minute appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday—forced most liberal-minded folks to their knees to laugh uncontrollably, cry tears of joy, pray to the comedy gods for our good fortune, or some combination of the three.
Conservatives, on the other hand, were pissed.
And with good reason: Stewart spent nearly the entire monologue skewering the type of biased and obfuscating reporting tactics that Roger Ailes and his ex-cohort at Fox News spent so many years peddling under the guise of fair-and-balanced journalism. One particular host who caught a fair amount of Stewart's shade: Mr. Sean Patrick Hannity, or as Stewart's called him, Lumpy.
No one—as in, zero humans—were surprised that Hannity felt the urge to strike back. On Friday afternoon on his radio program, The Sean Hannity Show, Lumpy went on a tirade.
He first said, grossly, that "that idiot Jon Stewart" had his "head so far up Obama's ass" and now has his head up [Hillary] Clinton's too. He continued:
"I know you're a rich liberal. Are you donating money to those families, the 46 million American families on food stamps, Jon? Hey, Jon, are you helping out the 50 million Americans in poverty? Hey, Jon, are you going to help use your wealth from all your comedy writers that lay out the material for you, are you going to help pay down the debt that Obama's accumulated" (Sullivan 1)?
Despite his text on Jan. 6, which suggested Trump had influence over the crowd, Hannity has recently floated the conspiracy theory (also pushed by Tucker Carlson on the network’s streaming platform) that parts of Jan. 6 were “staged.” “Do I think there were some people, based on the reports, that there were people that had staged certain things?” Hannity said on his radio show last month. “Yeah, I think that’s true.”
Responding to the news of his text to Meadows, Hannity said on his show: “Surprise, surprise, surprise: I said to Mark Meadows the exact same thing I was saying live on the radio at that time and on TV that night on Jan. 6 and well beyond Jan. 6.”
Here’s part of what Hannity said on his show that night: “I’d like to know who the agitators were,” he told viewers, adding that “those who truly support President Trump … do not support those that commit acts of violence.”
“I don’t care if the radical left, radical right — I don’t know who they are,” Hannity continued. “They’re not people I would support. So how were officials not prepared? We got to answer that question. How did they allow the Capitol building to be breached in what seemed like less than a few minutes” (Wade 2)?
A night after NBC’s Seth Meyers called out Sean Hannity and Fox News for their ongoing opposition to gun law reform, the Fox News Channel personality launched a tirade against the NBC Late Night host, chastising Meyers for name-calling before name-calling him a “limousine liberal, socialist, hypocritical asshole.”
“And you are not funny, ever,” Hannity zinged.
What set off the Donald Trump loyalist was Meyers’ Wednesday night “Closer Look” segment examining gun violence and the recent mass shootings in Boulder and Atlanta.
Meyers lambasted “a small minority of sociopaths with outsized power in politics who stand in the way when the rest of us try to do something about it,” and criticized Hannity for only “briefly mentioning” the Boulder shooting during his program.
Hannity took the bait. “You want to call me sociopathic, which you have called many others before, like Trump, like Karl Rove, you use the word a lot, but you’re just another limousine liberal, socialist, hypocritical asshole who does nothing but spew anti-GOP hate and has virtually nothing positive or productive to add to any political dialogue. You have zero credibility, zero integrity, zero interest in what the truth is, especially about complicated issues, and that’s why very few people watch your show. And you’re not funny, ever.”
…
This certainly isn’t the first time Hannity has feuded with a late-night comedian. Last summer he took on John Oliver after the HBO host of Last Week Tonight criticized Fox News for exaggerating the violence of Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests (Evans 1).
On Sunday, [New York Times columnist Ben] Smith published a fairly explosive piece revealing how [Tucker] Carlson—who portrays himself as the sworn enemy of the political and media elite—actually spends much of his time gossiping about Fox News and Donald Trump with Beltway reporters, with whom he has relationships despite publicly calling them “animals.”
As Smith reported, Carlson’s reputation as a frequent and reliable source serves as “a kind of insurance policy” that protects him from the marginalization other provocative right-wing pundits have suffered over the years.
“It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one reporter told Smith. Another reporter acknowledged that they naturally “go soft” on Carlson because he’s a known resource for stories.
While Hannity’s monologues and a Fox News.com op-ed going after those targets ostensibly centered on his [Hannity’s] complaints that the paper and its reporters are “Trump stalkers” who “kiss the ass” of President Joe Biden, the impetus for the sudden obsession with the Times has been less than subtle.
And by Thursday, any pretense of a facade that this wasn’t retaliation for the Carlson column was all but ditched.
In its Thursday newsletter, [the website] Popbitch included an item about Hannity doing his colleague’s dirty work and attacking the New York Times for outing Carlson as a “massive gossip” on stories about Fox and Trump.
“Keen to protect his colleague’s honour, Sean Hannity rushed to attack the piece on air, trashing the NYT in time-honoured Fox News fashion,” the site said. “But Hannity might not have been quite so quick to jump to his defence if he knew how Tucker spoke about him in those off-the-record gossip sessions.”
Popbitch went on to claim that the “brothers-in-arms” spirit “appears to only flow one way,” adding that one of Carlson favorite topics “to chuckle about with his MSM mates is how much of a cringing Trump sycophant Sean is.”
In the wake of Smith’s juicy exposé, Carlson did not immediately address the revelations and has remained mum on the air. Instead, Hannity has seemingly—and surely without any prompting from Fox executives, of course—taken it upon himself to serve as Fox’s attack dog, devoting much of his primetime show this week to blasting the New York Times, targeting its star reporter Maggie Haberman, and personally insulting Smith (Baragona 1-3).
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera accused primetime host Sean Hannity of “gaslighting” his viewers on Tuesday night during a discussion of the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“I think you’ve been — with all due respect and I love you — gaslighting, changing the subject,” said Rivera after Hannity rattled off a list of things he’d like to see the House Select Committee investigate beyond the scope of the current investigation.
Rivera went on, “The subject is January 6 and what happened to the United States Capitol and why it happened. Those two things: The fact that the Capitol was targeted and that the prime instigator, the one who unleashed the mob, was the President of the United States. For God’s sake, Sean –“
Hannity interrupted him, indignant over the accusation. What followed was a lot of crosstalk.
They continued to argue as Hannity compared the Capitol riot to Black Lives Matter demonstrations from the summer of 2020, insisting he’s been consistent in his condemnation of all riots (Ellefson 1).
Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham blasted Rep. Liz Cheney on Tuesday night for publicizing texts the two sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was unfolding, calling it both a smear attempt and a breach of their privacy.
Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the riot, read out the messages from Hannity and Ingraham on Monday night, shortly before the panel voted unanimously to recommend that Meadows be held in contempt of Congress.
…
“Last night in a weak attempt to smear yours truly — and presumably, I guess, President Trump — Congresswoman Cheney presented one of my text messages from Jan. 6 to Mark Meadows,” Hannity told his viewers.
..
Hannity described himself as an “honest and straightforward person” who tells his viewers the same things he says in private.
“Liz Cheney knows this. She doesn’t seem to care. She’s interested in one thing and one thing only: smearing Trump and purging him from the party,” he said.
“Liz, let’s release your phone records and texts, and your family discussing Donald Trump, considering you’re so free to release everybody else’s,” the host went on. “You’re a rock star now to the media mob, temporarily. They’ll turn on you again” (Moore 1-2).
Works cited:
Baragona, Justin. “Sean Hannity Is Totally Not Mad: ‘I Don’t Give a Shit What Anyone Says about Me’.” Daily Beast, June 24, 2021. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-ha...
Ellefson, Lindsey. “Geraldo Rivera Calls Out Sean Hannity for ‘Gaslighting’ about Capitol Riot – to His Face.” The Wrap, July 28, 2021. Net. https://www.thewrap.com/geraldo-river...
Evans, Greg. “Sean Hannity Calls Seth Meyers a “Limousine Liberal Socialist Hypocritical A**hole” Who Isn’t Even Funny.’” Deadline, March 26, 2021. Net. https://deadline.com/2021/03/sean-han...
Fox News Staff. “Hannity Warns against Vaccine Mandates.” Fox News, updated January 11, 2022. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/ha...
Moore, Mark. “Hannity, Ingraham Slam Cheney for Releasing Jan. 6 Messages to Meadows.” New York Post, December 15, 2021. Net. https://nypost.com/2021/12/15/hannity...
Sullivan, Eric. “Sean Hannity Used Potty Language To Retort Jon Stewart's Withering Criticism.” Esquire, July 24, 2016. Net. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics...
Wade, Peter. “New Texts Show Sean Hannity Panicking about Trump’s State of Mind after Jan. 6.” Rolling Stone, January 4, 2020. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
I think the vax, don't vax debate is over. There's nothing that Biden, Fauci, Kamala Harris, Walensky, any of them are going to say that's going to change people's minds. There are people willing to lose their salary, their benefits, even their pensions because they believe so strongly that they don't want it.
You agree or disagree, that's up to you. It doesn't matter. That's the reality in my view.
Now, these mandates will result in more workers quitting. We had four and a half million in November alone. That means more staff shortages, skyrocketing costs for businesses, but the liberal justices on the court predictably, they seem less concerned with the Constitution and all the negative consequences, more worried about fueling more never-ending pandemic theater and restrictions and draconian shutdowns.
…
Will somebody tell Justice Sotomayor that fully vaccinated people are getting omicron just like they got delta, fully vaccinated people with boosters are getting omicron, fully vaccinated people with boosters and natural immunity and previous infections, they're getting it again.
…
All right. Now, also tonight, yet another dismal Biden jobs report as the economy in December, added only new jobs, sharply missing projections and estimates of 400,000 as the Biden agenda now continues to disincentivize work, continues to fail on the COVID response.
And because the same candidate who said he would shut down the virus is doing just the opposite, and more people die from COVID in 2021 than 2020, and Joe inherited three vaccines and monoclonal antibodies and he's run out of tests and he's run out of therapeutics. And there's no Operation Warp Speed, it's operation -- as Dr. Siegel has said -- snail speed.
Now, Biden is shutting down jobs. He's shutting down opportunity. And he's shutting down prosperity in this country and a 40-year high of inflation.
But I guess no one thought to tell Joe how bad the numbers were because he's still out there you know touting historic job growth. Maybe somebody should bring him up to speed.
…
All right. Joe, build back broke, sorry, is not going to work. Your results are historic. They're historically awful bad. In under a year, we've gone from energy independence and net exporter of energy, now you're begging OPEC over and over and over again and the Russians, you know, to produce more oil and we all see rising prices at the pump and we're all paying the price for your horrific policies.
Now, we've gone from American sovereignty and secure borders to all out an open borders catastrophe that's costing us a fortune. We've gone from safety and security abroad to a complete debacle and disaster and abandonment of fellow Americans in Afghanistan. We've gone from stable prices to, what, nearly a 40-year high in inflation, a supply chain mess that's not getting any better.
On the COVID front, as I said, we had three vaccines, therapeutics handed to you, monoclonal antibodies and you're not producing any of it and even running out of tests at this point. You fail to even get enough tests leading into the Christmas holiday when it was recommended. …
Now, the Trump administration gave all of this to you, three vaccines to market in record time, the ones that you keep pushing every day, and you can't even deliver the basic tests. You know, we're now in the third year of this pandemic.
After bragging about a foolproof plan, right, Joe? You're going to shut down the virus. I guess not.
Where's Operation Warp Speed for testing? Where's Operation Warp Speed for monoclonal antibodies and these antivirals? Where's warp speed for studies on natural immunity?
Now, Biden is being forced to face reality and being forced to confront his failures. …
I'll ask again, tonight, has Joe Biden done a single thing to improve the lives of all of you the American people? Can you name a single thing? If you can, write us.
Anyway, Biden campaign who's going to shut down the virus, beat COVID, he's done just the opposite. And now he's saying there's no federal solution. He campaigned on unity, but yet he demonizes half the country, suggesting there are threats to democracy. He campaigned on being a moderate yet he continues to double down on build back Bolshevik socialism, and an election takeover scheme, and changing the rules in the Senate and a power grab here, there and everywhere.
There's nothing moderate about Joe Biden. He's weak. He's frail. And he's not only cognitively struggling, but deteriorating right before our eyes cognitively day in and day out, an absolute far left extremist socialist failure.
…
What I'd like to give you [Rand Paul], I can't deliver. I would like to give you Fauci's resignation or Fauci being fired. That would be the perfect birthday present, because there's nobody that's been more wrong throughout this entire pandemic than him and more importantly, you exposed the great lie of Dr. Fauci and that is the knowledge and the money from the NIH going to fund the Wuhan virology lab.
…
You're also a medical doctor and you refused to get the vaccine because you had a natural immunity. Omicron now, this is what we're seeing as you know -- fully vaccinated people, they're getting omicron. Vaccinated with a booster, they're getting omicron. Vaccinated, booster, previous infections, they're getting re-infected. So nothing is working.
…
So there's no test, there's no monoclonals available apparently around the country, and these antiviral medicines that every doctor that I talk to raves about, I don't know much about them, are not available either from Pfizer and Merck.
...
Now, tonight, the Democrats, they continue to fuel mass hysteria over January the 6th. They don't want to talk about Biden's failed agenda and they push forward with the sham committee they're not interested in finding out what really happened and how to prevent it again. There is a way to do that.
The sole purpose of this political stunt is to smear slander and purge Donald Trump from the political world. Now, if this were truly a fair, bipartisan committee, Nancy Pelosi would not have kicked off the committee Jim Jordan and Jim Banks from serving on the committee. Instead now, well, they're left with seven Democrats, including the pathological liar, the biggest purveyor of election fraud in the history of this country himself, how ironic, Adam Schiff.
The last four years, he was pushing election fraud lies about Trump Russia collusion and conspiracy theories, repeating the lie that the election was stolen. Why is he on this committee?
And, of course, you have Trump hating Republicans, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, not appointed by Republicans. No, hand-picked by Nancy Pelosi.
…
Now, if they really wanted to conduct a fair investigation and do it the right way and find out what happened so it would never happen again, there's certain people they need to call.
We now had testimony on this program last night. In fact, Donald Trump signed off on 20,000 National Guard troops after the summer of 2020, and 574 riots, knowing big crowds are coming to D.C., knowing there's always usually a bad actor when you have a big crowd.
Anyway, they would call Nancy Pelosi. They would call the D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to testify and ask, why didn't you support Donald Trump's request for the National Guard and put greater security measures in place? …
If you want to prevent this from happening again and I do, you need to bring those people in. Where's the committee to investigate also the 574 riots in the summer of 2020? Those riots left dozens of Americans dead, more than a couple thousand police officers injured, many severely, over 2 billion in property damage, looting and arson.
And meanwhile, amid the left's hysteria yesterday, the mob, the media actually managed to set a new low for themselves. Let's see, comparing Biden's hateful divisive speech to the Gettysburg address, comparing it to the Holocaust. Some people on MSNBC, comparing it to 9/11, comparing it to Pearl Harbor. …
…
They [the Jan. 6 committee] could write their final report now, but they'll save it to a week before the midterms. I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I blame Trump, I blame Trump.
…
You know, I watch and in my humble opinion just as an observer and I've been very outspoken and polls now show a majority of the American people … agree with me that Joe's in a serious cognitive decline, and we're watching this. We see his failures, we see his slip-ups that are constant seems to be getting worse -- I don't know what's worse, if Joe or Kamala. (Fox 1-15).
Hannity’s Reactions to Criticism
Jon Stewart's return to the world of political commentary—a ten-minute appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday—forced most liberal-minded folks to their knees to laugh uncontrollably, cry tears of joy, pray to the comedy gods for our good fortune, or some combination of the three.
Conservatives, on the other hand, were pissed.
And with good reason: Stewart spent nearly the entire monologue skewering the type of biased and obfuscating reporting tactics that Roger Ailes and his ex-cohort at Fox News spent so many years peddling under the guise of fair-and-balanced journalism. One particular host who caught a fair amount of Stewart's shade: Mr. Sean Patrick Hannity, or as Stewart's called him, Lumpy.
No one—as in, zero humans—were surprised that Hannity felt the urge to strike back. On Friday afternoon on his radio program, The Sean Hannity Show, Lumpy went on a tirade.
He first said, grossly, that "that idiot Jon Stewart" had his "head so far up Obama's ass" and now has his head up [Hillary] Clinton's too. He continued:
"I know you're a rich liberal. Are you donating money to those families, the 46 million American families on food stamps, Jon? Hey, Jon, are you helping out the 50 million Americans in poverty? Hey, Jon, are you going to help use your wealth from all your comedy writers that lay out the material for you, are you going to help pay down the debt that Obama's accumulated" (Sullivan 1)?
Despite his text on Jan. 6, which suggested Trump had influence over the crowd, Hannity has recently floated the conspiracy theory (also pushed by Tucker Carlson on the network’s streaming platform) that parts of Jan. 6 were “staged.” “Do I think there were some people, based on the reports, that there were people that had staged certain things?” Hannity said on his radio show last month. “Yeah, I think that’s true.”
Responding to the news of his text to Meadows, Hannity said on his show: “Surprise, surprise, surprise: I said to Mark Meadows the exact same thing I was saying live on the radio at that time and on TV that night on Jan. 6 and well beyond Jan. 6.”
Here’s part of what Hannity said on his show that night: “I’d like to know who the agitators were,” he told viewers, adding that “those who truly support President Trump … do not support those that commit acts of violence.”
“I don’t care if the radical left, radical right — I don’t know who they are,” Hannity continued. “They’re not people I would support. So how were officials not prepared? We got to answer that question. How did they allow the Capitol building to be breached in what seemed like less than a few minutes” (Wade 2)?
A night after NBC’s Seth Meyers called out Sean Hannity and Fox News for their ongoing opposition to gun law reform, the Fox News Channel personality launched a tirade against the NBC Late Night host, chastising Meyers for name-calling before name-calling him a “limousine liberal, socialist, hypocritical asshole.”
“And you are not funny, ever,” Hannity zinged.
What set off the Donald Trump loyalist was Meyers’ Wednesday night “Closer Look” segment examining gun violence and the recent mass shootings in Boulder and Atlanta.
Meyers lambasted “a small minority of sociopaths with outsized power in politics who stand in the way when the rest of us try to do something about it,” and criticized Hannity for only “briefly mentioning” the Boulder shooting during his program.
Hannity took the bait. “You want to call me sociopathic, which you have called many others before, like Trump, like Karl Rove, you use the word a lot, but you’re just another limousine liberal, socialist, hypocritical asshole who does nothing but spew anti-GOP hate and has virtually nothing positive or productive to add to any political dialogue. You have zero credibility, zero integrity, zero interest in what the truth is, especially about complicated issues, and that’s why very few people watch your show. And you’re not funny, ever.”
…
This certainly isn’t the first time Hannity has feuded with a late-night comedian. Last summer he took on John Oliver after the HBO host of Last Week Tonight criticized Fox News for exaggerating the violence of Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests (Evans 1).
On Sunday, [New York Times columnist Ben] Smith published a fairly explosive piece revealing how [Tucker] Carlson—who portrays himself as the sworn enemy of the political and media elite—actually spends much of his time gossiping about Fox News and Donald Trump with Beltway reporters, with whom he has relationships despite publicly calling them “animals.”
As Smith reported, Carlson’s reputation as a frequent and reliable source serves as “a kind of insurance policy” that protects him from the marginalization other provocative right-wing pundits have suffered over the years.
“It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one reporter told Smith. Another reporter acknowledged that they naturally “go soft” on Carlson because he’s a known resource for stories.
While Hannity’s monologues and a Fox News.com op-ed going after those targets ostensibly centered on his [Hannity’s] complaints that the paper and its reporters are “Trump stalkers” who “kiss the ass” of President Joe Biden, the impetus for the sudden obsession with the Times has been less than subtle.
And by Thursday, any pretense of a facade that this wasn’t retaliation for the Carlson column was all but ditched.
In its Thursday newsletter, [the website] Popbitch included an item about Hannity doing his colleague’s dirty work and attacking the New York Times for outing Carlson as a “massive gossip” on stories about Fox and Trump.
“Keen to protect his colleague’s honour, Sean Hannity rushed to attack the piece on air, trashing the NYT in time-honoured Fox News fashion,” the site said. “But Hannity might not have been quite so quick to jump to his defence if he knew how Tucker spoke about him in those off-the-record gossip sessions.”
Popbitch went on to claim that the “brothers-in-arms” spirit “appears to only flow one way,” adding that one of Carlson favorite topics “to chuckle about with his MSM mates is how much of a cringing Trump sycophant Sean is.”
In the wake of Smith’s juicy exposé, Carlson did not immediately address the revelations and has remained mum on the air. Instead, Hannity has seemingly—and surely without any prompting from Fox executives, of course—taken it upon himself to serve as Fox’s attack dog, devoting much of his primetime show this week to blasting the New York Times, targeting its star reporter Maggie Haberman, and personally insulting Smith (Baragona 1-3).
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera accused primetime host Sean Hannity of “gaslighting” his viewers on Tuesday night during a discussion of the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“I think you’ve been — with all due respect and I love you — gaslighting, changing the subject,” said Rivera after Hannity rattled off a list of things he’d like to see the House Select Committee investigate beyond the scope of the current investigation.
Rivera went on, “The subject is January 6 and what happened to the United States Capitol and why it happened. Those two things: The fact that the Capitol was targeted and that the prime instigator, the one who unleashed the mob, was the President of the United States. For God’s sake, Sean –“
Hannity interrupted him, indignant over the accusation. What followed was a lot of crosstalk.
They continued to argue as Hannity compared the Capitol riot to Black Lives Matter demonstrations from the summer of 2020, insisting he’s been consistent in his condemnation of all riots (Ellefson 1).
Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham blasted Rep. Liz Cheney on Tuesday night for publicizing texts the two sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was unfolding, calling it both a smear attempt and a breach of their privacy.
Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the riot, read out the messages from Hannity and Ingraham on Monday night, shortly before the panel voted unanimously to recommend that Meadows be held in contempt of Congress.
…
“Last night in a weak attempt to smear yours truly — and presumably, I guess, President Trump — Congresswoman Cheney presented one of my text messages from Jan. 6 to Mark Meadows,” Hannity told his viewers.
..
Hannity described himself as an “honest and straightforward person” who tells his viewers the same things he says in private.
“Liz Cheney knows this. She doesn’t seem to care. She’s interested in one thing and one thing only: smearing Trump and purging him from the party,” he said.
“Liz, let’s release your phone records and texts, and your family discussing Donald Trump, considering you’re so free to release everybody else’s,” the host went on. “You’re a rock star now to the media mob, temporarily. They’ll turn on you again” (Moore 1-2).
Works cited:
Baragona, Justin. “Sean Hannity Is Totally Not Mad: ‘I Don’t Give a Shit What Anyone Says about Me’.” Daily Beast, June 24, 2021. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/sean-ha...
Ellefson, Lindsey. “Geraldo Rivera Calls Out Sean Hannity for ‘Gaslighting’ about Capitol Riot – to His Face.” The Wrap, July 28, 2021. Net. https://www.thewrap.com/geraldo-river...
Evans, Greg. “Sean Hannity Calls Seth Meyers a “Limousine Liberal Socialist Hypocritical A**hole” Who Isn’t Even Funny.’” Deadline, March 26, 2021. Net. https://deadline.com/2021/03/sean-han...
Fox News Staff. “Hannity Warns against Vaccine Mandates.” Fox News, updated January 11, 2022. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/ha...
Moore, Mark. “Hannity, Ingraham Slam Cheney for Releasing Jan. 6 Messages to Meadows.” New York Post, December 15, 2021. Net. https://nypost.com/2021/12/15/hannity...
Sullivan, Eric. “Sean Hannity Used Potty Language To Retort Jon Stewart's Withering Criticism.” Esquire, July 24, 2016. Net. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics...
Wade, Peter. “New Texts Show Sean Hannity Panicking about Trump’s State of Mind after Jan. 6.” Rolling Stone, January 4, 2020. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
February 10, 2022
Amoralists -- Sean Hannity, Part Five -- Second Impeachment, January 6 Committee, Rage and Psychosis
… On one of the fundamental policy topics of the day, the pandemic, the right’s most influential news network is saying one thing to its audience and doing another in private.
Fox News’s programming on vaccines and vaccine mandates has been relentlessly hostile. Yet more than 90 percent of Fox News employees are fully vaccinated, and the company has a vaccine mandate that’s actually stricter than the one President Joe Biden has proposed for large corporations. Hosts tend not to mention this on air and, on the rare occasions that they do, they mislead their audience about it.
They are lying to their audience, and anyone paying close attention can see it.
These incidents speak to a deep pattern in modern conservatism, a parasitic relationship in which a super-wealthy elite preys on the fears of the conservative base for profit.
…
The basic idea is that the super-rich and their allies are in the driver’s seat of the GOP’s policy agenda — and what those elites want, more than anything else, are tax cuts and attacks on the social safety net. Recognizing that making the rich richer is an unpopular policy agenda, they have married their political fortunes to the forces of cultural reaction. The GOP wins elections by engaging in thinly veiled appeals to racism, xenophobia, and sexism; the super-rich win when those GOP majorities pass deeper and deeper tax cuts.
Fox News, … “the epicenter of resentment politics,” plays a crucial role in cementing this relationship (Beauchamp 2).
"You get impeached for doing nothing wrong. Then you get a second impeachment for doing nothing wrong." – Trump, April 2021
The first impeachment was because Trump asked a foreign power to investigate the son of a political rival and hinted that the country owed him that because of all the aid America provided. The second was because Trump egged on a crowd that went on to stage a violent insurrection at the US Capitol that left five people dead. So, yeah, "nothing wrong" (Cizzilla 1).
Fox News host Sean Hannity urged Republican senators to "stop enabling these psychotic, mentally unhinged Democratic socialists," and reject their impeachment "madness" when it reaches the Senate next week.
"Every Republican senator must stand against this post-presidency impeachment madness and reject it," the "Hannity" host told viewers Wednesday night.
"You shouldn't be a part of this circus."
Hannity had a specific warning for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is reported to be “done with Trump” and has shared with associates that he thinks a second impeachment could help the GOP exorcise the Trump association from their party.
"Senate Republicans, you want to go along with this nonsense, 75 million Americans went to the polls, [and] I’d argue they went there more for Donald Trump than for Republicans," the host said. "They should think about why people voted for Donald Trump, why they support his agenda.
"And Mitch McConnell, you should know better ..." he continued. "This nonsense in the Senate will get this country nowhere. It will not heal divisions, it will not improve the lives of Americans, it will only further divide a country that is weeks out from one of the hotly contested races in history."
Hannity later rounded on House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who joined nine other Republicans in voting for Trump's impeachment on a charge of "incitement of an insurrection."
"Liz Cheney, I have a message for those ten Republicans, good luck in your new Democratic Party," Hannity said. "I used to like you, liked your dad. You voted for impeachment. You're clearly out of step with Republicans and conservatives in this country. You don't belong in leadership" (Halon 1-2).
During Wednesday's edition of his radio program, Fox News host Sean Hannity described the second impeachment of President Donald Trump as "rage and psychosis" on the part of Democrats.
…
Hannity discussed the impeachment with conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly on Wednesday's episode of The Sean Hannity Show.
"It's so funny because, you know, I would've thought that I'd care more about this and, to me," Hannity said, "it's just an average day, Bill, of hearing Democrats—you called it neurosis. I've long been calling it out of control rage and psychosis" (Martin 1).
The Senate voted to acquit former President Donald Trump of inciting the January 6 riot at the Capitol in his second impeachment trial. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting "guilty" for a majority of 57 votes — but Democrats failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to convict.
The Republicans who joined with the Democrats were: Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
…
Mr. Trump issued a statement Saturday afternoon thanking his legal team, as well as the Republicans in the Senate who found him not guilty and GOP House members who voted against the article of impeachment last month. He did not acknowledge the riot in his statement.
"This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country," Mr. Trump said. "No president has ever gone through anything like it, and it continues because our opponents cannot forget the almost 75 million people, the highest number ever for a sitting president, who voted for us just a few short months ago" (Linton et. al. 1).
In the days that followed [the assault on the capitol building] Trump, some of the loudest and most influential members of the Republican Party and vocal partisan media personalities offered a deluge of justifications, excuses and conspiracy theories to reframe the events of Jan. 6 as no big deal.
• They said Jan. 6 was instigated by undercover left-wing activists who were part of antifa. That was proved false.
• They said the rioters hadn’t used force and one Republican congressman likened the events to "a normal tourist visit." Video proved that wrong.
• They claimed the attack on the Capitol had nothing to do with race, even though white supremacists and far-right militia groups were among the most active participants, and many rioters wore racist t-shirts.
• They suggested the whole affair was staged by the government, a false flag operation. Others suggested it was entirely a peaceful protest. All of that was wrong.
• They said that the rioters were political prisoners and shouldn’t face serious charges. A host of federal judges and courts have held otherwise (Holan, McCarthy, and Sherman 1-2)
Several days before the Capitol riot, Fox News host Sean Hannity sought to deter former President Donald Trump from trying to use January 6 to overturn the election results, according to texts revealed Tuesday by the House committee probing the insurrection.
The texts indicate that Hannity, a prominent supporter of the former president, held direct knowledge about Trump's strategy for the day of the electoral vote count and harbored concerns toward the plan, the committee said.
"I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told," Hannity texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on December 31, 2020, according to a letter sent by the committee to Hannity asking for his cooperation with their investigation.
Hannity advised Trump to instead move to Florida, announce that he would "lead the nationwide effort to reform voter integrity," and "watch Joe mess up daily."
…
The January 6 committee further mentioned that Hannity texted Meadows and Congressman Jim Jordan in the days preceding Biden's inauguration, warning that Trump should avoid pressing his claims about the election.
"Guys, we have to clear a path to land the plane in nine days. He can't mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I'm not sure what is left to do or say, and I don't like not knowing if it's truly understood. Ideas?" he wrote in the text, per the letter.
…
Last month, the committee revealed another set of texts from Hannity to Meadows, which showed that the Fox News host implored Trump on January 6 to ask rioters to leave the Capitol building and stop the insurrection (Loh 1-2).
Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, hosts at Fox News, sent texts to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol, the Jan 6. Committee revealed.
Both hosts spoke out against the committee releasing their messages Tuesday evening, said NBC News.
Hannity – who reportedly sent a message asking if former President Donald Trump should make a statement asking people to leave the Capitol – said that he felt the release was “an invasion of privacy.”
Ingraham said on her show Tuesday night that the committee and media have misrepresented her actions on Jan. 6.
“The entire Jan. 6 campaign has become one of revenge and defamation, of false characterization and false equivalencies,” she said.
…
During a Fox News interview of Meadows Tuesday, Hannity said “we’ve been telling you, this is a waste of your time and money,” regarding the Congressional committee investigation into the deadly Capitol insurrection. Through the riot, Trump supporters hoped to prevent the certification of votes for 2020 presidential election winner and current President Joe Biden.
Hannity has criticized the committee for being partisan. Out of nine members, two are Republican.
Meadows provided the messages to the committee. They were read Monday evening by Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the two Republicans on the panel. NBC News said at least three Fox News hosts were urging Meadows to get Trump to call off the rioters, per the texts.
"Mark, the president needs to tell the people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” read Ingraham’s text.
Hannity said that Cheney is attempting to smear Trump and “purge him from the party,” and Ingraham said release of the texts “ignores the facts of that day” (Barry 1-2).
Fox News host Sean Hannity attack the January 6 Committee during one of his latest shows, but failed to mention they have asked for his cooperation in their investigation.
Hannity said the January 6 Committee was created to draw attention away from what he described as President Jor Bidrn's "failures."
This comes after the January 6 Committee made the letter it sent to Hannity on January 4 public. The letter called for cooperation from Hannity and said it had information indicating he had advanced knowledge of Donald Trump's January 6 plans.
Hannity said: "I can't name a single thing, maybe you can, that Joe Biden can point to and identify as successful.
"So we had around 574 riots in the summer of 2020, dozens of Americans died, billions in property damage, arson and looting, thousands of cops injured, many seriously, where is that committee?
"Because they only seem to care about the one riot they can politicize.
"I condemned on January 6, I condemn tonight any rioting any place anywhere.
"Why won't they investigate those riots?"
…
… what happened in the summer, those were not peaceful protests.
"Those were violent outrageous attacks on the very democracy the Democrats pretend they want to protect."
Hannity closed the interview by saying the Committee is focussing on that "so they don't have to focus on Joe Biden's failures" (Kaonga 1-2).
Works cited:
Barry, Lauren. “Hannity Blasts Jan 6 Committee for Text Release: 'Invasion of Privacy'. WWJ*950, December 15, 2021. Net. https://www.audacy.com/wwjnewsradio/n...
Beauchamp, Zack. “January 6 Texts from Fox Hosts Reveal the Lie at the Heart of the Conservative Movement.” Vox, December 14, 2021. Net. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...
Cizzilla, Crhis. “The 35 Most Outrageous Lines from Donald Trump's 'Interview' with Sean Hannity.” CNN, updated April 21, 2021. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/politi...
Halon, Yael. “Hannity Urges McConnell To Reject Impeachment 'Madness' in Senate: 'You Should Know Better'. Fox News, January 13, 2021. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/media/hannity...
Holan, Angie Drobnic; MaCarthy, Bill; Sherman, Amy. “The 2021 Lie of the Year: Lies about the Jan. 6 Capitol Attack and Its Significance.” Politifact, December 15, 2021. Net. https://www.politifact.com/article/20...
Kaonga, Jerrard. “Sean Hannity Fails To Mention Letter Sent to Him by Jan. 6 Committee During Show.” Newsweek, January 5, 2022. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/sean-hannity...
Linton, Caroline; Segers, Grace; Watson, Kathyrn; and Quinn, Melissa. “Senate Votes To Acquit Trump in Historic Second Impeachment Trial. CBS News, February 14, 2021. Net. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/...
Loh, Matthew. “Days before the Capitol Attack, Sean Hannity Tried To Persuade Trump To Abandon His January 6 Strategy and Accept Defeat, Texts Show.” Business Insider, January 4, 2022. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/jan-6...
Martin, Jeffrey. Sean Hannity Calls Second Trump Impeachment Democratic 'Rage and Psychosis'. Newsweek, January 13, 2021. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/sean-hannity...
Fox News’s programming on vaccines and vaccine mandates has been relentlessly hostile. Yet more than 90 percent of Fox News employees are fully vaccinated, and the company has a vaccine mandate that’s actually stricter than the one President Joe Biden has proposed for large corporations. Hosts tend not to mention this on air and, on the rare occasions that they do, they mislead their audience about it.
They are lying to their audience, and anyone paying close attention can see it.
These incidents speak to a deep pattern in modern conservatism, a parasitic relationship in which a super-wealthy elite preys on the fears of the conservative base for profit.
…
The basic idea is that the super-rich and their allies are in the driver’s seat of the GOP’s policy agenda — and what those elites want, more than anything else, are tax cuts and attacks on the social safety net. Recognizing that making the rich richer is an unpopular policy agenda, they have married their political fortunes to the forces of cultural reaction. The GOP wins elections by engaging in thinly veiled appeals to racism, xenophobia, and sexism; the super-rich win when those GOP majorities pass deeper and deeper tax cuts.
Fox News, … “the epicenter of resentment politics,” plays a crucial role in cementing this relationship (Beauchamp 2).
"You get impeached for doing nothing wrong. Then you get a second impeachment for doing nothing wrong." – Trump, April 2021
The first impeachment was because Trump asked a foreign power to investigate the son of a political rival and hinted that the country owed him that because of all the aid America provided. The second was because Trump egged on a crowd that went on to stage a violent insurrection at the US Capitol that left five people dead. So, yeah, "nothing wrong" (Cizzilla 1).
Fox News host Sean Hannity urged Republican senators to "stop enabling these psychotic, mentally unhinged Democratic socialists," and reject their impeachment "madness" when it reaches the Senate next week.
"Every Republican senator must stand against this post-presidency impeachment madness and reject it," the "Hannity" host told viewers Wednesday night.
"You shouldn't be a part of this circus."
Hannity had a specific warning for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is reported to be “done with Trump” and has shared with associates that he thinks a second impeachment could help the GOP exorcise the Trump association from their party.
"Senate Republicans, you want to go along with this nonsense, 75 million Americans went to the polls, [and] I’d argue they went there more for Donald Trump than for Republicans," the host said. "They should think about why people voted for Donald Trump, why they support his agenda.
"And Mitch McConnell, you should know better ..." he continued. "This nonsense in the Senate will get this country nowhere. It will not heal divisions, it will not improve the lives of Americans, it will only further divide a country that is weeks out from one of the hotly contested races in history."
Hannity later rounded on House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who joined nine other Republicans in voting for Trump's impeachment on a charge of "incitement of an insurrection."
"Liz Cheney, I have a message for those ten Republicans, good luck in your new Democratic Party," Hannity said. "I used to like you, liked your dad. You voted for impeachment. You're clearly out of step with Republicans and conservatives in this country. You don't belong in leadership" (Halon 1-2).
During Wednesday's edition of his radio program, Fox News host Sean Hannity described the second impeachment of President Donald Trump as "rage and psychosis" on the part of Democrats.
…
Hannity discussed the impeachment with conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly on Wednesday's episode of The Sean Hannity Show.
"It's so funny because, you know, I would've thought that I'd care more about this and, to me," Hannity said, "it's just an average day, Bill, of hearing Democrats—you called it neurosis. I've long been calling it out of control rage and psychosis" (Martin 1).
The Senate voted to acquit former President Donald Trump of inciting the January 6 riot at the Capitol in his second impeachment trial. Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in voting "guilty" for a majority of 57 votes — but Democrats failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to convict.
The Republicans who joined with the Democrats were: Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
…
Mr. Trump issued a statement Saturday afternoon thanking his legal team, as well as the Republicans in the Senate who found him not guilty and GOP House members who voted against the article of impeachment last month. He did not acknowledge the riot in his statement.
"This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country," Mr. Trump said. "No president has ever gone through anything like it, and it continues because our opponents cannot forget the almost 75 million people, the highest number ever for a sitting president, who voted for us just a few short months ago" (Linton et. al. 1).
In the days that followed [the assault on the capitol building] Trump, some of the loudest and most influential members of the Republican Party and vocal partisan media personalities offered a deluge of justifications, excuses and conspiracy theories to reframe the events of Jan. 6 as no big deal.
• They said Jan. 6 was instigated by undercover left-wing activists who were part of antifa. That was proved false.
• They said the rioters hadn’t used force and one Republican congressman likened the events to "a normal tourist visit." Video proved that wrong.
• They claimed the attack on the Capitol had nothing to do with race, even though white supremacists and far-right militia groups were among the most active participants, and many rioters wore racist t-shirts.
• They suggested the whole affair was staged by the government, a false flag operation. Others suggested it was entirely a peaceful protest. All of that was wrong.
• They said that the rioters were political prisoners and shouldn’t face serious charges. A host of federal judges and courts have held otherwise (Holan, McCarthy, and Sherman 1-2)
Several days before the Capitol riot, Fox News host Sean Hannity sought to deter former President Donald Trump from trying to use January 6 to overturn the election results, according to texts revealed Tuesday by the House committee probing the insurrection.
The texts indicate that Hannity, a prominent supporter of the former president, held direct knowledge about Trump's strategy for the day of the electoral vote count and harbored concerns toward the plan, the committee said.
"I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told," Hannity texted then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on December 31, 2020, according to a letter sent by the committee to Hannity asking for his cooperation with their investigation.
Hannity advised Trump to instead move to Florida, announce that he would "lead the nationwide effort to reform voter integrity," and "watch Joe mess up daily."
…
The January 6 committee further mentioned that Hannity texted Meadows and Congressman Jim Jordan in the days preceding Biden's inauguration, warning that Trump should avoid pressing his claims about the election.
"Guys, we have to clear a path to land the plane in nine days. He can't mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I'm not sure what is left to do or say, and I don't like not knowing if it's truly understood. Ideas?" he wrote in the text, per the letter.
…
Last month, the committee revealed another set of texts from Hannity to Meadows, which showed that the Fox News host implored Trump on January 6 to ask rioters to leave the Capitol building and stop the insurrection (Loh 1-2).
Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, hosts at Fox News, sent texts to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol, the Jan 6. Committee revealed.
Both hosts spoke out against the committee releasing their messages Tuesday evening, said NBC News.
Hannity – who reportedly sent a message asking if former President Donald Trump should make a statement asking people to leave the Capitol – said that he felt the release was “an invasion of privacy.”
Ingraham said on her show Tuesday night that the committee and media have misrepresented her actions on Jan. 6.
“The entire Jan. 6 campaign has become one of revenge and defamation, of false characterization and false equivalencies,” she said.
…
During a Fox News interview of Meadows Tuesday, Hannity said “we’ve been telling you, this is a waste of your time and money,” regarding the Congressional committee investigation into the deadly Capitol insurrection. Through the riot, Trump supporters hoped to prevent the certification of votes for 2020 presidential election winner and current President Joe Biden.
Hannity has criticized the committee for being partisan. Out of nine members, two are Republican.
Meadows provided the messages to the committee. They were read Monday evening by Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the two Republicans on the panel. NBC News said at least three Fox News hosts were urging Meadows to get Trump to call off the rioters, per the texts.
"Mark, the president needs to tell the people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” read Ingraham’s text.
Hannity said that Cheney is attempting to smear Trump and “purge him from the party,” and Ingraham said release of the texts “ignores the facts of that day” (Barry 1-2).
Fox News host Sean Hannity attack the January 6 Committee during one of his latest shows, but failed to mention they have asked for his cooperation in their investigation.
Hannity said the January 6 Committee was created to draw attention away from what he described as President Jor Bidrn's "failures."
This comes after the January 6 Committee made the letter it sent to Hannity on January 4 public. The letter called for cooperation from Hannity and said it had information indicating he had advanced knowledge of Donald Trump's January 6 plans.
Hannity said: "I can't name a single thing, maybe you can, that Joe Biden can point to and identify as successful.
"So we had around 574 riots in the summer of 2020, dozens of Americans died, billions in property damage, arson and looting, thousands of cops injured, many seriously, where is that committee?
"Because they only seem to care about the one riot they can politicize.
"I condemned on January 6, I condemn tonight any rioting any place anywhere.
"Why won't they investigate those riots?"
…
… what happened in the summer, those were not peaceful protests.
"Those were violent outrageous attacks on the very democracy the Democrats pretend they want to protect."
Hannity closed the interview by saying the Committee is focussing on that "so they don't have to focus on Joe Biden's failures" (Kaonga 1-2).
Works cited:
Barry, Lauren. “Hannity Blasts Jan 6 Committee for Text Release: 'Invasion of Privacy'. WWJ*950, December 15, 2021. Net. https://www.audacy.com/wwjnewsradio/n...
Beauchamp, Zack. “January 6 Texts from Fox Hosts Reveal the Lie at the Heart of the Conservative Movement.” Vox, December 14, 2021. Net. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...
Cizzilla, Crhis. “The 35 Most Outrageous Lines from Donald Trump's 'Interview' with Sean Hannity.” CNN, updated April 21, 2021. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/politi...
Halon, Yael. “Hannity Urges McConnell To Reject Impeachment 'Madness' in Senate: 'You Should Know Better'. Fox News, January 13, 2021. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/media/hannity...
Holan, Angie Drobnic; MaCarthy, Bill; Sherman, Amy. “The 2021 Lie of the Year: Lies about the Jan. 6 Capitol Attack and Its Significance.” Politifact, December 15, 2021. Net. https://www.politifact.com/article/20...
Kaonga, Jerrard. “Sean Hannity Fails To Mention Letter Sent to Him by Jan. 6 Committee During Show.” Newsweek, January 5, 2022. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/sean-hannity...
Linton, Caroline; Segers, Grace; Watson, Kathyrn; and Quinn, Melissa. “Senate Votes To Acquit Trump in Historic Second Impeachment Trial. CBS News, February 14, 2021. Net. https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/...
Loh, Matthew. “Days before the Capitol Attack, Sean Hannity Tried To Persuade Trump To Abandon His January 6 Strategy and Accept Defeat, Texts Show.” Business Insider, January 4, 2022. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/jan-6...
Martin, Jeffrey. Sean Hannity Calls Second Trump Impeachment Democratic 'Rage and Psychosis'. Newsweek, January 13, 2021. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/sean-hannity...
February 6, 2022
The Amoralists, Sean Hannity, Part Four, 2020 Impeachment
Democrats launched the impeachment inquiry following a whistleblower’s report suggesting that Trump withheld U.S. military aid from Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating his political rival, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
A president can be impeached if his or her acts are inconsistent with their presidential duties, whether or not it violates criminal law. It is the job of the House to decide whether there’s enough evidence to show that Trump committed an impeachable offense. First, articles of impeachment would have to pass the full U.S. House of Representatives with a simple majority. Those articles would then be sent to the Senate for a trial. A two-thirds Senate vote is required to convict — that is, remove — the president (Kertscher 1).
The public hearings over the next few weeks will focus on allegations that the president used U.S. foreign policy for personal gain. The impeachment inquiry centers largely on a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the Trump administration was holding up nearly $400 million in aid that Congress had approved.
Commentators on MSNBC have signaled in the days leading up to the hearing that they will focus on the testimony of diplomats and security officials who have already given sworn statements, including that Trump backers such as his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani pursued a “shadow” foreign policy.
Fox News commentators seem determined to broaden the inquiry — putting on trial everyone from Biden and his son, Hunter, to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), to the anonymous whistleblower who raised an alarm about the Trump-Zelensky call and whom Trump has suggested is guilty of “treason.”
…
Trump confidant Sean Hannity gave over the end of one show last week to a clip from radio host Rush Limbaugh, who proclaimed: “They are trying to overturn a duly constituted, legal election. This is a direct assault on the Constitution. It’s a direct assault on the American voter. … And they’re going to try to destroy the people you vote for, as a means of destroying you and dispiriting you.”
[According to Fox] Multiple guests suggest that witnesses never heard directly from Trump that he wanted to hold U.S. aid to Ukraine to get dirt on his political opponents.
…
Fox hosts have savaged Democrats for withholding the name [of the whistleblower], while also suggesting they knew the identity, without revealing it. “It’s scurrilous. It’s cowardly and it’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” Trump’s onetime acting Atty. Gen. Matt Whitaker told Hannity. “A person in America does have the right to face their accusers, the last I read,” said a seemingly incredulous Hannity.
…
[Fox News:] Multiple guests have said complaints against Trump all amount to disagreements with his foreign policy and that Trump only wanted to root out corruption. [Radio host Mark] Levin told Hannity: “If he wants to treat Ukraine in a certain way, he is free to do it” (Rainey 2-6).
Within the bubble of the Fox News White House, the hunt for Biden family corruption was a fully coherent agenda, one that had the secretary of state, attorney general, and president’s lawyer traipsing around the globe to hunt down clues. But outside that bubble, it’s a very different story. Instead of a tale of the US president bravely facing down corruption, it looks like — because it is — a story of a US president enlisting foreign countries to kneecap his domestic political rivals.
That’s a reflection of the unusual relationship that Fox has with Trump: They might be his propaganda network, but he’s their most enthusiastic, credulous, and powerful viewer. They’re both, together, trapped in a world of their own making, and surprised when the rest of the country doesn’t see what they’ve convinced themselves of (Hemmer 5).
… Sean Hannity … supplied talking points for any other Republicans accused of a cover-up. Accompanied by graphics that said things like "DEMS VS. THE CONSTITUTION," Hannity said the articles of impeachment "are an affront to our entire constitutional system."
When he wasn't quoting Trump's lawyers word-for-word, Hannity was mirroring their arguments.
Notably, parts of his monologue were directed at members of the GOP. He mocked Republicans who dare take the charges seriously.
"No Republican senator — listen, voters out there, you elect these people — should give this one iota of legitimacy," he said.
Several GOP senators, like Mitt Romney of Utah, have done that. Hannity — who is known to be very close to Trump — seemed to be telling wayward senators to get in single-file line behind the president.
Hannity then addressed GOP voters: "It is not your Republican senators' job to bolster what are pathetically weak articles of impeachment from the House. It is not your senators' duty to call witnesses that the House didn't even subpoena. It is not your representative's responsibility to investigative evidence the House neglected to examine. There are no do-overs. The Senate doesn't get to take on the constitutional role of the House. Senators review the articles of impeachment — that's it — as delivered by the House."
Hannity's message was crystal clear: New witnesses shouldn't be allowed. New evidence shouldn't be introduced. He was saying, in essence, let's all allow Trump to get back to work.
"288 days" until the election, he commented, "but who's counting? (Stelter 2)?
Tuesday night, Nov. 19, 2019, 9 p.m.
… Sean Hannity opened his show by calling the hearings a “huge dud” and an “embarrassing spectacle.” A variety of headlines scrolled below him, calling the hearings a “witch trial” and a “sham.”
Lawmakers are holding hearings to figure out if Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals in a July call. But Hannity defended the president by citing the rough transcript, saying that Trump never said that he would restrict foreign aid. While it is not explicitly mentioned in the rough transcript, the Washington Post reported Trump ordered a hold on military aid to Ukraine days before the call.
Hannity rejected the witness’ testimony and insisted the only witness the American people need to hear from is the whistleblower.
“Not one witness was necessary, not a single one,” Hannity said. “There was no quid, no pro, no quo, no pressure, no extortion.”
As the show continued, Hannity said Americans don’t care about the impeachment hearings because fewer people have been watching the hearings on TV than those who tuned into former President Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings 45 years ago. ...
...
Hannity added the first hearings failed to change public opinion of the inquiry, citing a Mroning Consult poll indicating support for the inquiry has decreased. (In contrast, a FiveThirtyEight poll released Tuesday suggests most Americans think Trump committed an impeachable offense.)
The guests on his program included Rep. Jim Jordan, who questioned each of the witnesses at the hearings, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. (Casey 1).
Sean Hannity did not hold back Wednesday night, blasting the Senate impeachment trial and impeachment manage Adam Schiff, D-Calif., describing his performance as "never-ending, nonstop feigned moral outrage" by a "lunatic."
"He looked like a lunatic who's lost his mind. Babbling, repeating over and over and over and over again incoherently," Hannity said on his television program.
The host didn't stop there, playing a montage and time-lapse of Schiff reiterating his dislike of the performance.
"He's monotonous, repetitive, boring. For three long, horrific hours he waged the single most crooked, lying, dishonest smear campaign, the likes of which, even for Washington, took my breath away," Hannity said. "He is a national disgrace, a stain on the Democratic Party, a walking, talking, lying con man, a perfect representation of everything that is wrong in the D.C. swamp."
"Every time this man -- for over three years -- has opened his mouth, he's lied," Hannity added.
Hannity then compared the impeachment push by Democrats to "election interference."
"If Democrats are really concerned with election interference... you look no further than in a mirror because the 'Schumer-Schiff sham show' is just their latest attempt to reclaim power at any cost," Hannity said. "They haven't done anything for you, we the people" (Garcia 1).
Fox News host Sean Hannity, who has repeatedly slammed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) as a “congenital liar” and “lunatic,” ramped up his attacks on the lead House impeachment manager on Wednesday night, describing him as a “sociopath.” “By the way, think about all those Democrats that are asking you to trust them,” the Fox star exclaimed on his prime-time show. “Think about who is begging for witnesses. There he is. The compromised, in this particular case, corrupt, and we all know, the congenital liar by the name of Adam Schiff.”
“How could anyone in good conscience ever trust what is merely a pretty despicable sociopath?!” Hannity added. “His pants have been on fire for three consecutive years” (Baragona 1).
Works cited:
Baragona, Justin. “Hannity Calls Adam Schiff a ‘Pretty Despicable Sociopath’. Daily Beast, January 29, 2020. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/hannity...
Casey, Chris. “An Hour of TV Time with Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.” The Wash, November 20, 2019. Net. http://thewash.org/2019/11/20/an-hour...
Garcia, Victor. “Sean Hannity Goes Off on 'Lunatic' Adam Schiff.” Fox News, January 22, 2020. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/media/sean-ha...
Hemmer, Nicole. “The Difference between Nixon and Trump Is Fox News.” Vox, October 17, 2019. Net. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...
Kertscher, Tom. “Fox News Analyst Correct: Impeachment Inquiry Is Following Rules by Questioning Witnesses in Private.” Politifact, October 28, 2019. Net. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks...
Rainey, James. “The Impeachment Show on MSNBC and Fox News: Preparing To Prosecute, or Defend, Trump.” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2019. Net. https://www.latimes.com/politics/stor...
Stelter, Brian. “Sean Hannity Says Republicans Shouldn't Give Impeachment Trial 'One Iota of Legitimacy'.” CNN, January 21, 2020. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/21/media/...
A president can be impeached if his or her acts are inconsistent with their presidential duties, whether or not it violates criminal law. It is the job of the House to decide whether there’s enough evidence to show that Trump committed an impeachable offense. First, articles of impeachment would have to pass the full U.S. House of Representatives with a simple majority. Those articles would then be sent to the Senate for a trial. A two-thirds Senate vote is required to convict — that is, remove — the president (Kertscher 1).
The public hearings over the next few weeks will focus on allegations that the president used U.S. foreign policy for personal gain. The impeachment inquiry centers largely on a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the Trump administration was holding up nearly $400 million in aid that Congress had approved.
Commentators on MSNBC have signaled in the days leading up to the hearing that they will focus on the testimony of diplomats and security officials who have already given sworn statements, including that Trump backers such as his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani pursued a “shadow” foreign policy.
Fox News commentators seem determined to broaden the inquiry — putting on trial everyone from Biden and his son, Hunter, to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), to the anonymous whistleblower who raised an alarm about the Trump-Zelensky call and whom Trump has suggested is guilty of “treason.”
…
Trump confidant Sean Hannity gave over the end of one show last week to a clip from radio host Rush Limbaugh, who proclaimed: “They are trying to overturn a duly constituted, legal election. This is a direct assault on the Constitution. It’s a direct assault on the American voter. … And they’re going to try to destroy the people you vote for, as a means of destroying you and dispiriting you.”
[According to Fox] Multiple guests suggest that witnesses never heard directly from Trump that he wanted to hold U.S. aid to Ukraine to get dirt on his political opponents.
…
Fox hosts have savaged Democrats for withholding the name [of the whistleblower], while also suggesting they knew the identity, without revealing it. “It’s scurrilous. It’s cowardly and it’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” Trump’s onetime acting Atty. Gen. Matt Whitaker told Hannity. “A person in America does have the right to face their accusers, the last I read,” said a seemingly incredulous Hannity.
…
[Fox News:] Multiple guests have said complaints against Trump all amount to disagreements with his foreign policy and that Trump only wanted to root out corruption. [Radio host Mark] Levin told Hannity: “If he wants to treat Ukraine in a certain way, he is free to do it” (Rainey 2-6).
Within the bubble of the Fox News White House, the hunt for Biden family corruption was a fully coherent agenda, one that had the secretary of state, attorney general, and president’s lawyer traipsing around the globe to hunt down clues. But outside that bubble, it’s a very different story. Instead of a tale of the US president bravely facing down corruption, it looks like — because it is — a story of a US president enlisting foreign countries to kneecap his domestic political rivals.
That’s a reflection of the unusual relationship that Fox has with Trump: They might be his propaganda network, but he’s their most enthusiastic, credulous, and powerful viewer. They’re both, together, trapped in a world of their own making, and surprised when the rest of the country doesn’t see what they’ve convinced themselves of (Hemmer 5).
… Sean Hannity … supplied talking points for any other Republicans accused of a cover-up. Accompanied by graphics that said things like "DEMS VS. THE CONSTITUTION," Hannity said the articles of impeachment "are an affront to our entire constitutional system."
When he wasn't quoting Trump's lawyers word-for-word, Hannity was mirroring their arguments.
Notably, parts of his monologue were directed at members of the GOP. He mocked Republicans who dare take the charges seriously.
"No Republican senator — listen, voters out there, you elect these people — should give this one iota of legitimacy," he said.
Several GOP senators, like Mitt Romney of Utah, have done that. Hannity — who is known to be very close to Trump — seemed to be telling wayward senators to get in single-file line behind the president.
Hannity then addressed GOP voters: "It is not your Republican senators' job to bolster what are pathetically weak articles of impeachment from the House. It is not your senators' duty to call witnesses that the House didn't even subpoena. It is not your representative's responsibility to investigative evidence the House neglected to examine. There are no do-overs. The Senate doesn't get to take on the constitutional role of the House. Senators review the articles of impeachment — that's it — as delivered by the House."
Hannity's message was crystal clear: New witnesses shouldn't be allowed. New evidence shouldn't be introduced. He was saying, in essence, let's all allow Trump to get back to work.
"288 days" until the election, he commented, "but who's counting? (Stelter 2)?
Tuesday night, Nov. 19, 2019, 9 p.m.
… Sean Hannity opened his show by calling the hearings a “huge dud” and an “embarrassing spectacle.” A variety of headlines scrolled below him, calling the hearings a “witch trial” and a “sham.”
Lawmakers are holding hearings to figure out if Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals in a July call. But Hannity defended the president by citing the rough transcript, saying that Trump never said that he would restrict foreign aid. While it is not explicitly mentioned in the rough transcript, the Washington Post reported Trump ordered a hold on military aid to Ukraine days before the call.
Hannity rejected the witness’ testimony and insisted the only witness the American people need to hear from is the whistleblower.
“Not one witness was necessary, not a single one,” Hannity said. “There was no quid, no pro, no quo, no pressure, no extortion.”
As the show continued, Hannity said Americans don’t care about the impeachment hearings because fewer people have been watching the hearings on TV than those who tuned into former President Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings 45 years ago. ...
...
Hannity added the first hearings failed to change public opinion of the inquiry, citing a Mroning Consult poll indicating support for the inquiry has decreased. (In contrast, a FiveThirtyEight poll released Tuesday suggests most Americans think Trump committed an impeachable offense.)
The guests on his program included Rep. Jim Jordan, who questioned each of the witnesses at the hearings, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. (Casey 1).
Sean Hannity did not hold back Wednesday night, blasting the Senate impeachment trial and impeachment manage Adam Schiff, D-Calif., describing his performance as "never-ending, nonstop feigned moral outrage" by a "lunatic."
"He looked like a lunatic who's lost his mind. Babbling, repeating over and over and over and over again incoherently," Hannity said on his television program.
The host didn't stop there, playing a montage and time-lapse of Schiff reiterating his dislike of the performance.
"He's monotonous, repetitive, boring. For three long, horrific hours he waged the single most crooked, lying, dishonest smear campaign, the likes of which, even for Washington, took my breath away," Hannity said. "He is a national disgrace, a stain on the Democratic Party, a walking, talking, lying con man, a perfect representation of everything that is wrong in the D.C. swamp."
"Every time this man -- for over three years -- has opened his mouth, he's lied," Hannity added.
Hannity then compared the impeachment push by Democrats to "election interference."
"If Democrats are really concerned with election interference... you look no further than in a mirror because the 'Schumer-Schiff sham show' is just their latest attempt to reclaim power at any cost," Hannity said. "They haven't done anything for you, we the people" (Garcia 1).
Fox News host Sean Hannity, who has repeatedly slammed House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) as a “congenital liar” and “lunatic,” ramped up his attacks on the lead House impeachment manager on Wednesday night, describing him as a “sociopath.” “By the way, think about all those Democrats that are asking you to trust them,” the Fox star exclaimed on his prime-time show. “Think about who is begging for witnesses. There he is. The compromised, in this particular case, corrupt, and we all know, the congenital liar by the name of Adam Schiff.”
“How could anyone in good conscience ever trust what is merely a pretty despicable sociopath?!” Hannity added. “His pants have been on fire for three consecutive years” (Baragona 1).
Works cited:
Baragona, Justin. “Hannity Calls Adam Schiff a ‘Pretty Despicable Sociopath’. Daily Beast, January 29, 2020. Net. https://www.thedailybeast.com/hannity...
Casey, Chris. “An Hour of TV Time with Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.” The Wash, November 20, 2019. Net. http://thewash.org/2019/11/20/an-hour...
Garcia, Victor. “Sean Hannity Goes Off on 'Lunatic' Adam Schiff.” Fox News, January 22, 2020. Net. https://www.foxnews.com/media/sean-ha...
Hemmer, Nicole. “The Difference between Nixon and Trump Is Fox News.” Vox, October 17, 2019. Net. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...
Kertscher, Tom. “Fox News Analyst Correct: Impeachment Inquiry Is Following Rules by Questioning Witnesses in Private.” Politifact, October 28, 2019. Net. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks...
Rainey, James. “The Impeachment Show on MSNBC and Fox News: Preparing To Prosecute, or Defend, Trump.” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2019. Net. https://www.latimes.com/politics/stor...
Stelter, Brian. “Sean Hannity Says Republicans Shouldn't Give Impeachment Trial 'One Iota of Legitimacy'.” CNN, January 21, 2020. Net. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/21/media/...
February 3, 2022
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-ne...
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-han...
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/arti...
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/bu...
“Fox News Faces Lawsuit over Its Coronavirus Coverage.” missoulacurrent.com. Net. https://missoulacurrent.com/governmen...
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-ne...
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-han...
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/arti...
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/bu...
“Fox News Faces Lawsuit over Its Coronavirus Coverage.” missoulacurrent.com. Net. https://missoulacurrent.com/governmen...
January 30, 2022
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/medi...
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-...
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/lifest...
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/2016/8/18/1250507...
Mayer, Jane. “The Making of the Fox News White House.” The New York Times, March 4, 2019. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
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/bu...
Shaer, Matthew. “How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?” New York Times, November 28, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/ma...
…
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/medi...
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-...
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/lifest...
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/2016/8/18/1250507...
Mayer, Jane. “The Making of the Fox News White House.” The New York Times, March 4, 2019. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
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/bu...
Shaer, Matthew. “How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?” New York Times, November 28, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/ma...
January 23, 2022
The Amoralists, Sean Hannity Part One, Getting Established
The following is the beginning of a new series of posts featuring prominent amoral Republican Party officials and advocates.
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/dicti...
***
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...
Shaer, Matthew. “How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?” New York Times, November 28, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/ma...
“Sean Hannity.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Ha...
Warren, James. “How Roger Ailes Created Sean Hannity.” Vanity Fair, November 29, 2017. Net. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...
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/dicti...
***
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...
Shaer, Matthew. “How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?” New York Times, November 28, 2017. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/ma...
“Sean Hannity.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Ha...
Warren, James. “How Roger Ailes Created Sean Hannity.” Vanity Fair, November 29, 2017. Net. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...
January 16, 2022
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/...
***
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.
***
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/...
***
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.
January 6, 2022
Letters, 2021, GOP Destroying Democracy, January 16; January 27; June 23; June 26; July 29; October 2, 9; October 23
An old adversary got me started in 2021.
***
A few years ago when Arnold Palmer was blistering the golf courses, the media labeled his many devoted followers as “Arnie’s Army.”
In my opinion, the liberal press and electronic news media should come up with the term “Trump’s Troopers” for those supporting the President, because no matter what they throw at President Trump and his devoted followers, the almost 75,000,000 folks that voted for him are not going away anytime soon.
There appears to be plenty of evidence regarding the fraud that went on to cheat the president out of his reelection.
One would have to be both blind and deft to believe otherwise.
I am standing by for the retort I will probably get to this letter but it will fall on deaf ears; a spade is a spade and by any other term it is a spade.
Tony Cavarno
Printed January 16, 2021 in the Siusalw News
***
I submitted the following letter to the Siuslaw News January 17, Editor “Ed” be damned. It was not printed on the 20th or 23, the next two editions of the paper. This is what I had written.
***
Tony Cavarno challenged Siuslaw News readers to response to his January16 Opinion statement that the recent presidential election had been rigged, that Trump had won. I offer these excerpts from a 2018 article written by Christian pastor and author John Pavlovitz. https://johnpavlovitz.com/2018/08/07/...)
I think it’s time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. I think we do understand them:
We understand that they have dug in their heels so deeply, they will not be moved by anything—not facts or data or truth or their own eyes.
…
If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that willing to deny country and humanity simply because they’re offended, that thin-skinned and prone to mutiny—their dispositions aren’t really a burden the rest of us should or could bear.
…
… since these people will not be moved, the rest of us need to move together.
…
We don’t need to convince or coddle or win over hatred, and we don’t need to outdo it either.
We need to outnumber it.
We need to outlast it.
We need to outlove it.
We need to outvote it.
To this I add: We need to declare always what is true and what is not.
***
Editor Ed printed a version of the letter January 27.
He removed the link to the Pavlovitz article.
He used a semi-colon and a closed quotation mark – neither of which was necessary – and omitted my three dots between certain excerpts that indicated that the excerpts were not consecutive.
He omitted (the phrase is in bold letters) a part of one excerpt that I definitely wanted included: “If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that willing to deny country and humanity simply because they’re offended, that thin-skinned and prone to mutiny—their dispositions aren’t really a burden the rest of us should or could bear.
Ed cannot help himself. Everything must comport to his sense of propriety. Never mind that the author should be entitled to express exactly what he believes.
***
Several months later Ed resigned his position and left the newspaper. I submitted the following letter to test whether the new Siuslaw News editor would print what Ed would never accept.
***
Strike up the band. Release the balloons. Our greatest president will be reinstated in August!
Thank you, ninjas in Arizona, for exposing how the Socialist lefties and George Soros, Bill Gates, and Anthony Fauci cheated Donald J. Trump out of being reelected!
Our leader warned us about mail-in ballots. The media mob and the socialists in Congress have attacked Trump like no President before him. So unfair. You know it. I know it. He’s a stable genius. He’s got a big brain. He knows more than the generals.
You should thank him for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. And Biden, now taking all the credit! Disgraceful!
Fake news wants you to believe that we MAGAs attacked the capitol. It was Antifa dressed to look like us! Yes, some of us were there, We were peaceful. We had really good reasons to protest! If you don’t play by the rules, you don’t have a country!
AOC, that Muslim Omar, Pelosi, Pocahantas, Clinton, Abrams, Shifty Schiff, Sleepy Joe want to ruin it! Every real American state legislator, governor and flag-waving patriot must stop the steal! Forever!
If you believe this garbage, you’ve been suckered by the king of liars and a political party shamelessly dishonest. GOP-controlled state houses and governors have passed legislation that cements autocratic rule. Congressional and Senate Republicans are fine with it. They and their media mouthpieces are traitors to our democracy!
Stop their theft of unfettered, universal suffrage, of receiving always from all media sources truthful information, of our wanting to attempt to enjoy a productive, fulfilling life!
Printed June 23, 2021, in the Siuslaw News
***
The only change to this letter was that two words – “that Muslim” – were removed. One person responded to the letter.
***
This week’s Letters to the Editor made me wonder what a newcomer might conclude about Florence. My discomfort comes from the litany of “Trumpisms” which drip with disdain (“Suckered into Belief,” Harold Titus). Instead of a tone welcoming diversity of thought, these diatribes claim to be facts.
Publish more topics of shared interests and concerns, please.
Bou Kilgore
Printed June 26, 2021 in the Siuslaw News
***
The following letter was a condensation of a 400+ letter I sent to the Florence City Council honoring the request of Mike Allen, FADC member and local climate change activist.
***
Bruce Jarvis’s request July 19 that the City Council adopt a “Stand for Freedom” resolution to make clear that the city of Florence “will not assist our governor or any state agency with the enforcement of any law, mandate or edict that is against the United States Constitution” is the product of a fevered mind. Jarvis referenced “widespread discord and unrest … rampant in our society today” and that “such a resolution will serve to unite our community and increase our sense of personal safety.” The “discord and unrest” so rampant in our country is the result of the madness of current Trumpian Republican Party policy that seeks to cement permanent autocratic, one-party minority rule that is the antithesis of one-person one-vote democratic practice.
Sam Spayd, referencing climate change, declared that “time spent by our city council would be better utilized in dealing with the issues that are right in our face .. [that] present a definite challenge to the time our city council has for dealing with issues which will have a direct impact upon our lives.” The menace of climate change is not “in our face”? Does not “have a direct impact upon our lives”? What can be said about such deniers of fact, of science – these blatant tunnel-visioned proponents of benefit solely for corporations and self – that evades derision?
There are principled Republicans who champion democracy, cherish truth, respect science, value individual sacrifice and social responsibility. Step forward.
Printed July 29, 2021, in the Siuslaw News
***
I offered the Siuslaw News the following letter in August. The editor held the letter for 7 weeks. I finally sent my letter to The World. They printed it without a single alteration. Soon afterward the Siuslaw News editor sent me an email informing me that she had had a large backlog of letters yet to be printed and would print mine in the next edition, October 9.
***
Ultra right conservative viewpoints do not constitute majority thinking in this country. History has demonstrated that such thinking put into practice (anti-mask, anti-vaccination, and denial of climate change being examples) is invariably destructive of the lives and physical and economic health of most Americans. Right now we are 14 months away from becoming a fascist nation ruled by a soulless party committed entirely to the seizure and maintenance of dictatorial power.
During my lifetime the GOP has always been a White male, Christian, corporation-directed party. Its office holders have been rewarded handsomely for promoting and protecting the interests of their wealthy donors. It can not dare to say to ordinary citizens, “You don’t matter because your well being clashes with what the Koch brothers, Exxon, Chevron, the pharmaceutical industry, and most large corporations demand.” Instead, Republican officials and their media mouthpieces lie, incessantly. The Democratic Party is evil incarnate. They will destroy our beloved country. With their costly economic programs, do you really really want – horrors – Socialism? The debt! The debt! Why, tax cuts for the rich grow the economy, create jobs! You, too, will benefit! (Never mind that your income has remained stagnant for decades. Never mind that so many Americans are destitute, about to be evicted, already homeless.)
Complementing GOP lies is the party’s use of wedge issues. They shape and intensify White Americans’ existing resentments, fears, and prejudices. Dems want abortion on demand. Biden’s gonna get your guns. Illegals are streaming across our borders. Blacks are gonna take your jobs and ransack your neighborhoods. God and our way of life are going to be erased.
Same old, still same old. Now much more! Democracies don’t survive when dishonest politicians count the vote!
Printed October 2, 2021, in The World
October 9, 2021, in the Siuslaw News. The Siuslaw News editor held the letter 7 weeks, informing me politely of a huge back load.
***
An old adversary responded.
***
In response to a letter in the Oct. 9 Siuslaw News entitled “They Say,” I want to ask --- what planet is Mr. Titus living on?
It’s easy for a retired person living in a very comfortable community such as Florence with a secure income to throw out a letter to convey that all is well and beautiful under the current administration, Really?
The influence of this administration is reaching across America to tear everything apart for our survival. When you go outside of our cocoon here, you will have a wake-up call.
Mr. Titus can criticize the conservative Christians, but I have to point out that these are the very people who are working tirelessly to maintain the freedom and values we grew up with as children.
We are not against masks and vaccinations per se, but the mandates of force. The climate change is another issue for control over the way we live. The liberal politicians say one thing and do another.
Our education system is one of the more serious issues at hand. Some things have no business being taught in our schools, directing our youth towards radical ideas. Education should be a guide towards a career, not an indoctrination to cause division.
It’s grievous to see what has happened to this country in these short nine months: gas prices on the rise and soon to be in short supply, empty grocery shelves in larger cities, nurses and doctors walking off their jobs, airlines canceling flights in large numbers and the list goes on. This is just the beginning.
People are afraid and becoming desperate.
In my mind, the delusional democrats need to get a grip on reality.
Donna Dobson
Printed October 23, 2021, in the Siuslaw News
***
I’m happy to report that in the Siuslaw News’s October 3 edition fellow Democratic Club member Karen Mahoney rebuffed Donna Dobson’s GOP talking points – especially this phrase: “The influence of this administration is reaching across America to tear everything apart for our survival” brilliantly.
***
A few years ago when Arnold Palmer was blistering the golf courses, the media labeled his many devoted followers as “Arnie’s Army.”
In my opinion, the liberal press and electronic news media should come up with the term “Trump’s Troopers” for those supporting the President, because no matter what they throw at President Trump and his devoted followers, the almost 75,000,000 folks that voted for him are not going away anytime soon.
There appears to be plenty of evidence regarding the fraud that went on to cheat the president out of his reelection.
One would have to be both blind and deft to believe otherwise.
I am standing by for the retort I will probably get to this letter but it will fall on deaf ears; a spade is a spade and by any other term it is a spade.
Tony Cavarno
Printed January 16, 2021 in the Siusalw News
***
I submitted the following letter to the Siuslaw News January 17, Editor “Ed” be damned. It was not printed on the 20th or 23, the next two editions of the paper. This is what I had written.
***
Tony Cavarno challenged Siuslaw News readers to response to his January16 Opinion statement that the recent presidential election had been rigged, that Trump had won. I offer these excerpts from a 2018 article written by Christian pastor and author John Pavlovitz. https://johnpavlovitz.com/2018/08/07/...)
I think it’s time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. I think we do understand them:
We understand that they have dug in their heels so deeply, they will not be moved by anything—not facts or data or truth or their own eyes.
…
If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that willing to deny country and humanity simply because they’re offended, that thin-skinned and prone to mutiny—their dispositions aren’t really a burden the rest of us should or could bear.
…
… since these people will not be moved, the rest of us need to move together.
…
We don’t need to convince or coddle or win over hatred, and we don’t need to outdo it either.
We need to outnumber it.
We need to outlast it.
We need to outlove it.
We need to outvote it.
To this I add: We need to declare always what is true and what is not.
***
Editor Ed printed a version of the letter January 27.
He removed the link to the Pavlovitz article.
He used a semi-colon and a closed quotation mark – neither of which was necessary – and omitted my three dots between certain excerpts that indicated that the excerpts were not consecutive.
He omitted (the phrase is in bold letters) a part of one excerpt that I definitely wanted included: “If adults are that fragile in the face of reality, that willing to deny country and humanity simply because they’re offended, that thin-skinned and prone to mutiny—their dispositions aren’t really a burden the rest of us should or could bear.
Ed cannot help himself. Everything must comport to his sense of propriety. Never mind that the author should be entitled to express exactly what he believes.
***
Several months later Ed resigned his position and left the newspaper. I submitted the following letter to test whether the new Siuslaw News editor would print what Ed would never accept.
***
Strike up the band. Release the balloons. Our greatest president will be reinstated in August!
Thank you, ninjas in Arizona, for exposing how the Socialist lefties and George Soros, Bill Gates, and Anthony Fauci cheated Donald J. Trump out of being reelected!
Our leader warned us about mail-in ballots. The media mob and the socialists in Congress have attacked Trump like no President before him. So unfair. You know it. I know it. He’s a stable genius. He’s got a big brain. He knows more than the generals.
You should thank him for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J. And Biden, now taking all the credit! Disgraceful!
Fake news wants you to believe that we MAGAs attacked the capitol. It was Antifa dressed to look like us! Yes, some of us were there, We were peaceful. We had really good reasons to protest! If you don’t play by the rules, you don’t have a country!
AOC, that Muslim Omar, Pelosi, Pocahantas, Clinton, Abrams, Shifty Schiff, Sleepy Joe want to ruin it! Every real American state legislator, governor and flag-waving patriot must stop the steal! Forever!
If you believe this garbage, you’ve been suckered by the king of liars and a political party shamelessly dishonest. GOP-controlled state houses and governors have passed legislation that cements autocratic rule. Congressional and Senate Republicans are fine with it. They and their media mouthpieces are traitors to our democracy!
Stop their theft of unfettered, universal suffrage, of receiving always from all media sources truthful information, of our wanting to attempt to enjoy a productive, fulfilling life!
Printed June 23, 2021, in the Siuslaw News
***
The only change to this letter was that two words – “that Muslim” – were removed. One person responded to the letter.
***
This week’s Letters to the Editor made me wonder what a newcomer might conclude about Florence. My discomfort comes from the litany of “Trumpisms” which drip with disdain (“Suckered into Belief,” Harold Titus). Instead of a tone welcoming diversity of thought, these diatribes claim to be facts.
Publish more topics of shared interests and concerns, please.
Bou Kilgore
Printed June 26, 2021 in the Siuslaw News
***
The following letter was a condensation of a 400+ letter I sent to the Florence City Council honoring the request of Mike Allen, FADC member and local climate change activist.
***
Bruce Jarvis’s request July 19 that the City Council adopt a “Stand for Freedom” resolution to make clear that the city of Florence “will not assist our governor or any state agency with the enforcement of any law, mandate or edict that is against the United States Constitution” is the product of a fevered mind. Jarvis referenced “widespread discord and unrest … rampant in our society today” and that “such a resolution will serve to unite our community and increase our sense of personal safety.” The “discord and unrest” so rampant in our country is the result of the madness of current Trumpian Republican Party policy that seeks to cement permanent autocratic, one-party minority rule that is the antithesis of one-person one-vote democratic practice.
Sam Spayd, referencing climate change, declared that “time spent by our city council would be better utilized in dealing with the issues that are right in our face .. [that] present a definite challenge to the time our city council has for dealing with issues which will have a direct impact upon our lives.” The menace of climate change is not “in our face”? Does not “have a direct impact upon our lives”? What can be said about such deniers of fact, of science – these blatant tunnel-visioned proponents of benefit solely for corporations and self – that evades derision?
There are principled Republicans who champion democracy, cherish truth, respect science, value individual sacrifice and social responsibility. Step forward.
Printed July 29, 2021, in the Siuslaw News
***
I offered the Siuslaw News the following letter in August. The editor held the letter for 7 weeks. I finally sent my letter to The World. They printed it without a single alteration. Soon afterward the Siuslaw News editor sent me an email informing me that she had had a large backlog of letters yet to be printed and would print mine in the next edition, October 9.
***
Ultra right conservative viewpoints do not constitute majority thinking in this country. History has demonstrated that such thinking put into practice (anti-mask, anti-vaccination, and denial of climate change being examples) is invariably destructive of the lives and physical and economic health of most Americans. Right now we are 14 months away from becoming a fascist nation ruled by a soulless party committed entirely to the seizure and maintenance of dictatorial power.
During my lifetime the GOP has always been a White male, Christian, corporation-directed party. Its office holders have been rewarded handsomely for promoting and protecting the interests of their wealthy donors. It can not dare to say to ordinary citizens, “You don’t matter because your well being clashes with what the Koch brothers, Exxon, Chevron, the pharmaceutical industry, and most large corporations demand.” Instead, Republican officials and their media mouthpieces lie, incessantly. The Democratic Party is evil incarnate. They will destroy our beloved country. With their costly economic programs, do you really really want – horrors – Socialism? The debt! The debt! Why, tax cuts for the rich grow the economy, create jobs! You, too, will benefit! (Never mind that your income has remained stagnant for decades. Never mind that so many Americans are destitute, about to be evicted, already homeless.)
Complementing GOP lies is the party’s use of wedge issues. They shape and intensify White Americans’ existing resentments, fears, and prejudices. Dems want abortion on demand. Biden’s gonna get your guns. Illegals are streaming across our borders. Blacks are gonna take your jobs and ransack your neighborhoods. God and our way of life are going to be erased.
Same old, still same old. Now much more! Democracies don’t survive when dishonest politicians count the vote!
Printed October 2, 2021, in The World
October 9, 2021, in the Siuslaw News. The Siuslaw News editor held the letter 7 weeks, informing me politely of a huge back load.
***
An old adversary responded.
***
In response to a letter in the Oct. 9 Siuslaw News entitled “They Say,” I want to ask --- what planet is Mr. Titus living on?
It’s easy for a retired person living in a very comfortable community such as Florence with a secure income to throw out a letter to convey that all is well and beautiful under the current administration, Really?
The influence of this administration is reaching across America to tear everything apart for our survival. When you go outside of our cocoon here, you will have a wake-up call.
Mr. Titus can criticize the conservative Christians, but I have to point out that these are the very people who are working tirelessly to maintain the freedom and values we grew up with as children.
We are not against masks and vaccinations per se, but the mandates of force. The climate change is another issue for control over the way we live. The liberal politicians say one thing and do another.
Our education system is one of the more serious issues at hand. Some things have no business being taught in our schools, directing our youth towards radical ideas. Education should be a guide towards a career, not an indoctrination to cause division.
It’s grievous to see what has happened to this country in these short nine months: gas prices on the rise and soon to be in short supply, empty grocery shelves in larger cities, nurses and doctors walking off their jobs, airlines canceling flights in large numbers and the list goes on. This is just the beginning.
People are afraid and becoming desperate.
In my mind, the delusional democrats need to get a grip on reality.
Donna Dobson
Printed October 23, 2021, in the Siuslaw News
***
I’m happy to report that in the Siuslaw News’s October 3 edition fellow Democratic Club member Karen Mahoney rebuffed Donna Dobson’s GOP talking points – especially this phrase: “The influence of this administration is reaching across America to tear everything apart for our survival” brilliantly.
