Thin-skinned Sean Hannity must have been in quite a tizzy this weekend. First, he was mocked on Saturday Night Live for his bromance with Donald Trump. On Sunday, Hannity got raked over the coals by CNN’s Reliable Sources for his lack of journalistic integrity.
In a discussion about the perils of Donald Trump’s Fox News cocoon, host Brian Stelter played a clip from the hilarious SNL “presidential debate.” In it, Alec Baldwin, perfect as Donald Trump, mocked the actual moment in the debate when Trump suggested that Hannity is a real journalist who could validate his claim to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.
Then Reliable Sources guest David Zurawik, of the Baltimore Sun, really let Hannity have it (transcript via Media Matters).
ZURAWIK: When I was thinking of Sean Hannity in connection with this, I went back and I found a piece where Hannity interviewed Sarah Palin on September 18, 2008. And in it he is serving up softballs, he never follows up, he’s servile. And they made the set with this china cabinet and American flags look like it might be an executive office building so that she would look normal in this setting. And it was so pitiful to see the way this was going. And you remember, she was only doing those interviews. Last line of my review was look, she couldn’t even handle the softballs from servile Sean Hannity, next week she’s supposed to talk to Katie Couric, maybe they better rethink that because she’s so much in the bubble, she can’t deal with real stuff.
And I’ll tell you what—you saw this in the debate when Trump kept saying I don’t know why the media won’t call up Sean Hannity, they should call up Sean Hannity. I’m siting there going, who would care what Sean Hannity said? If I went to my editors and said, hey you know Sean Hannity said Donald really did say Iraq, they’d laugh, they’d throw me out the window of the newsroom. But he’s in that bubble. He’s in that Fox bubble where he believes that Sean Hannity’s opinion or Sean Hannity could actually verify your story and anybody would believe it.
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan added her two cents:
SULLIVAN: I think that we all understand that Hannity is kind of an arm of the Trump campaign who happens to be in sort of an island on Fox. But I don’t know the extent to which the Fox audience or the, you know, the general public really knows or sees that. …There are hard news reporters and there are commentators, but I think Hannity, in this case, is in sort of a class by himself.
Zurawik added, “Even folks at Fox see him as kind of a party apparatchik. …I think he even makes some of them uncomfortable.”
You may recall that Hannity has previously called for Stelter to be fired because he had such conniptions over “pipsqueak” Stelter’s criticism. Hannity has also threatened to sue CNN for slander because he can’t take what he regularly dishes out.
How will Hannity retaliate this time? Watch the discussion from the October 2, 2016 Reliable Sources and post your prediction below.
I consider Hannity a certain body part of the Drumpf campaign, too — though “arm” isn’t exactly the part I’m thinking of . . .
.
Fox News is indeed its own bubble.
Sean Hannity is within his own bubble within their bubble.
Hence, a bubble within a bubble…