Sen. Ted Cruz with Sean Hannity on the Fox News set, from Hannity’s Facebook page.
Right now, at this point in time, Sean Hannity is arguably the most powerful political pundit in the United States. His prime time show on Fox News draws 3 million viewers nightly and is regularly the most watched news program on cable. His 3-hour conservative talk-radio show draws 13.5 million listeners daily, second only to Rush Limbaugh. In today’s fractured media landscape, where all media outlets are fighting for a decreasing market share, Hannity has a relatively large footprint.
The native New Yorker has worked hard to get where he is today, doing time as a construction contractor and honing his oppressed, white, working-class Christian shtick at radio stations in the Deep South until he was discovered by Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes in 1996. Hannity dutifully supported Republican President George W. Bush and the Iraq War and was a leading proponent of birtherism, the conspiracy theory that Democratic President Barrack Obama was born in Kenya.
For all of this, Hannity has been rewarded handsomely. He’s been a highly paid member of the “media elite” he continues to criticize for decades; last year his TV and radio contracts earned him $36 million.
Hannity has been stoking his audience’s fears of Islamic terrorism, illegal immigration, the Clinton crime family, the liberal media and the decline in Christian family values for years, and was thus ideally placed for the unlikely rise of candidate Donald Trump, for whom he was an early and fervent supporter. Since Trump was elected, Hannity has remained loyal, vociferously defending the president against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between Russian state actors and the Trump campaign during the election.
As we learned last week from the Washington Post, Trump has rewarded Hannity’s unconditional support with unprecedented access, consulting regularly with the pundit on policy issues and strategy. One anonymous White House staffer said Hannity was more or less acting as a “shadow chief-of-staff,” which must have given Trump’s actual chief-of-staff, Gen. John Kelly, little comfort.
Kelly’s charge spends a good chunk of his workday watching “Fox and Friends” in the morning and Hannity at night, issuing angry, undisciplined tweets that are often just reiterations of what he’s heard on those programs, which in turn are pro-Trump talking points in the first place. An enormous feedback loop has been created between Trump and his base, a self-reinforcing echo chamber in which the president can do no wrong and his many detractors need to be locked up.
In essence, Fox News has become the state-controlled media apparatus Sean Hannity has been warning listeners about for years, with Hannity serving as Minister of Truth.
Hannity’s role as unofficial presidential propagandist wasn’t the only reason he was in the news last week. It turns out that along with sharing advice with Trump, Hannity has been sharing attorneys with the president, three of them, most notably Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time fixer, who, in the weeks before the 2016 election, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to remain silent about her alleged sexual tryst with the president in 2006.
Two weeks ago, federal prosecutors in Manhattan, acting upon a referral from special council Robert Mueller, seized Cohen’s records, reportedly to investigate for potential campaign finance law and legal code violations. Cohen, who has exactly three clients, last week pleaded with the court to protect one client’s identity from public scrutiny.
That client turned out to be none other than Hannity, who has been vigorously defending Cohen on both his TV and radio programs for months, a blatant conflict of interest he didn’t reveal to his audience or his employers.
Try substituting the name of Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather in place of Hannity’s in the above paragraph, and you’ll have some idea how low journalism standards have sunk in the Trump era.
Fox News refused to discipline its most popular host, and Hannity claimed he’d only consulted Cohen a few times on real estate matters. This past weekend, The Guardian revealed why Hannity might be in need of such legal advice: During the past 10 years, the pundit has amassed a $90-million real estate portfolio, purchasing hundreds of distressed properties during the foreclosure crisis with loans guaranteed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, even as he heaped scorn on Obama for supposedly causing the crisis.
Naturally, most of the other major mainstream media outlets were elated to report the surprise, potentially salacious connection between Hannity and Cohen – Trump’s fixer – since Hannity has routinely branded them all “fake news” for months.
Some commentators pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed champion of America’s “forgotten men and women” scooping up foreclosed homes on the cheap in the wake of the Great Recession. But only MSNBC’s Joy Reid went so far as to describe Fox News and Hannity’s direct connection with the president as “state-esque news.”
There’s a reason why most mainstream commentators didn’t go there. As anyone who’s ever read Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” understands, what we today call the “mainstream media” has long functioned as part of the state apparatus, shaping public opinion and perception to suit the whims of the rich and powerful, particularly the denizens of Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
Sean Hannity is right. There is a deep state. The conceit both he and his mainstream media detractors would have us believe is that they’re all not part of it.
Nowhere has this been more clear than in the coverage of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The so-called liberal mainstream media, which actually represents the neoliberal Clinton and moderate never-Trump establishment – not progressives – have gone all-in on an attempt to impeach Trump and remove him from office, ignoring evidence that indicates Obama-era justice department officials may have been politically motivated when they began their investigation.
That’s created a considerable news vacuum on the right and hard right, and Fox News and Hannity have had no problem filling the void. After the Cohen story went viral, Hannity actually seemed to draw power from what anyone else might consider a bad news week, playing a looped tape of the 186 times his name, “Sean Hannity,” was mentioned by other broadcasters and pundits over and over and over on his radio program, with delirious glee.
On Monday, after the Guardian revealed his real estate empire for the first time, Hannity came out firing on his radio show in true paranoid fashion, claiming the negative coverage was just further evidence that he’s been right all along about the deep state, and now they were out to get him.
He then proceeded into a seething 5-minute monologue, railing against Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server while she was Secretary of State, and Anthony Weiner’s laptop, and former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump, sparking special counselor Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between Russian state actors and the Trump campaign.
It was classic over-the-top Hannity; he’s been spouting the same theories for months on end. But there’s a method to his madness. Hannity hasn’t been the stifled conservative lone wolf he pretends to be for a long time. He’s been a deep-state actor himself since the Bush years, when he helped push phony stories about weapons of mass destruction on Fox News. He endured the Obama years as an unbearable troll, and now, with the rise of Trump, he has real power.
Hannity flexed his newfound muscles at the end of the monologue, noting that 11 House Republicans last week filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Clinton, Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, FBI Agent Peter Strzok, FBI Counsel Lisa Page, as well as other DOJ and FBI personnel connected to work on the infamous Steele Dossier.
In other words, they’re the same cast of characters Hannity’s been attacking for months as members of a vast conspiracy to take down Trump.
I’ve been following the mainstream media’s one-sided coverage of the Russian collusion investigation with concern since it began more than a year ago. So far, no convincing evidence that Trump did collude with Russia to influence the outcome of the election has been presented to the public, but Mueller is still investigating. From Comey’s memos, it appears likely Trump did attempt to obstruct justice, but that, too, has yet to be proven.
Now we have a potential parallel investigation that includes Comey and other witnesses involved in Mueller’s investigation, threatening to undermine the special counselor before he can conclude the investigation.
Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. Suppose Hannity and the president are proved right, or even half-right, in their assertions that Mueller’s investigation began as a politically motivated witch-hunt? What then?
Well, for starters, people would have to stop calling Sean Hannity stupid, at least in public, and acknowledge him for the shrewd deep-state player he truly is.
I know, that’s pretty hard to swallow, if you’re not a Hannity fan. A lot is riding on what federal prosecutors find in Michael Cohen’s records, and whether they can charge him with a crime severe enough to compel him to flip on Trump.
Stormy Daniels may save us yet.
