A few days ago, I addressed the troubling issue of Sean Hannity, the Fox News star, and his hidden ties to the Trump administration. With the revelation that Hannity shares an attorney with the president—namely the disgraced Michael Cohen, who’s now a key player in the Department of Justice’s investigation of the White House and its secret Kremlin links—it’s high time to ask exactly what sort of “journalism” Hannity is pushing at Fox News.
Moreover, when coupled with my previous revelations of Hannity’s “reporting” of rancid disinformation scripted by Russian intelligence as “news,” plus his clandestine relationship with WikiLeaks—said by President Donald Trump’s own CIA director to be a Kremlin front—Fox News is making itself a player not just in the Trump administration, but a target of any fair and balanced investigation of it. As I stated:
With the revelation that Cohen has been Hannity’s attorney, in some fashion that neither of them wished to disclose, it is even more imperative that Fox News explain why it keeps a Kremlin propagandist without any semblance of professional ethics on the air. If they fail to do so, that network is exposing itself to counterintelligence scrutiny as well.
To the surprise of nobody who has observed that network in action, Fox News quickly decided that Hannity’s ethical missteps regarding Cohen were no big deal. Per its statement on the case: “We have reviewed the matter and spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support.” Nevertheless, the network’s own media analyst explained that Hannity was clearly in the wrong, ethically speaking, by commenting many times on-air about Cohen, invariably favorably, without divulging his relationship with him.
Other reports are even less favorable to the network and its ethical standards, rather lack thereof. Vanity Fair this week quoted anonymous staffers at the network about what it termed the Hannity-induced “crisis”: “This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen,” stated one. Another added, “This is bad. It violates every rule of journalism.”
That said, it’s not difficult to divine why Hannity remains on the air. He’s a headliner, the network’s most prominent talker and nighttime draw for its pro-Trump viewers. Moreover, Hannity’s astonishingly close relationship with this White House, viewed negatively as almost a parody of “access journalism” by outsiders, seems to only bolster his position at Fox News. As The Washington Post reported this week, Hannity talks frequently with Trump, serving as a senior advisor to the Oval Office and playing a pivotal role in the administration’s media war against Trump’s enemies—above all Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation of the president’s Kremlin ties. The Fox News star “basically has a desk” in the White House, explained one presidential adviser to the Post.
Normal journalism, this is not. Since I’ve castigated the mainstream media for its fawning over President Barack Obama, allowing his staff to play them like an instrument, particularly regarding foreign policy, let me add that the Hannity case outstrips even those low-points in terms of journalistic integrity. Clearly Fox News is happy to let its leading on-air personality act as a propagandist for Trump. It’s high time for the network to remove “news” from its title if Hannity is its idea of journalism.
