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. 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.
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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.
Hannity told me his removal was “deserved”; in retrospect, he said, his statements were “ignorant and embarrassing.” His views on same-sex marriage, he stressed, were now “libertarian,” and he has gay friends. But 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. Bill Dunnavant, Hannity’s boss at his first professional radio gig, in Huntsville, 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, “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 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.”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.
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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 in response to allegations of sexual harassment.)“Sean definitely led the ‘Come on, guys, we can’t let our boss go down’ group,” Geraldo Rivera told me. “But Sean is also the one who ultimately said to me, ‘From what I’ve seen and heard, some of the allegations are true.’ ” Hannity told me of Ailes: “You know, sometimes people are complicated in life, sometimes it’s not black and white. Some of the most brilliant people I have met in my life — something I don’t have to worry about; I consider myself pretty average — the most brilliant people, often their blessing can be their curse. Do I believe everything that was said? No. Do I think maybe some of it is true? Maybe.” He added, “But if you assume for a second some of it was true, that’s a side of him I never knew, never saw.”Photo
Back to the old (Long Island) sod: Hannity in Franklin Square, N.Y.
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Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
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.”Hannity’s overt backing of the Tea Party was not unique at Fox News. But he wasn’t just backing the movement on air: He was also participating in fund-raising activities and allowing his image to be attached to promotional mailers for groups like the Tea Party Patriots, which was also an advertiser on his radio show. And occasionally he pushed into fringier terrain, as when in 2011 he 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.”At least publicly, Ailes did not always seem comfortable with Hannity’s association with the Tea Party, and in 2010, he forbade Hannity to tape his Fox show from the stage of a Tea Party fund-raiser in Ohio. (Hannity says he was unaware that the group had charged for tickets.) But according to a source at Fox News, Ailes’s private reaction was considerably more measured: “Look, Roger was smart — he knew how much money was being generated by the opinion-side guys versus the news-side guys.” Hannity was called into Ailes’s office and sent on his way with a promise not to involve the show in any future fund-raising gigs.The success of the Tea Party movement, Hannity told me recently, made him certain that if Obama-era Democratic rule were going to be toppled, it would not be with more establishment Republican politics. In 2015, after observing Mitt Romney’s sound thumping in the previous presidential election, he decided to fly around the country to secure the first interview with Republican contenders, preferably immediately after each one announced. He chartered fights himself, spending almost a million dollars in travel expenses. He saw it as “an investment in the business.”“I’d take friends, my staff, whatever,” he told me. “I’d always fill the seats.” He gravitated early to the Tea Party favorite, Ted Cruz. “But then I’d go to a Trump rally,” he told me. “You only had to open your eyes and see the enthusiasm.”Among Hannity’s critics, his relationship with Trump is frequently depicted as nakedly and sycophantically transactional — one career entertainer grabbing onto the coattails of another and hanging on for dear life. But people close to the president and Hannity say this caricature vastly oversimplifies the complicated and evolving alliance between the two men and misunderstands the degree to which Trump, as candidate and president, has come to Hannity’s positions, rather than the other way around.
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“A big part of how Trump gauges how things are going is how they play out on television in particular,” a Trump campaign official told me. And long before he began his presidential bid in the lobby of Trump Tower in June 2015, Trump was a frequent viewer of “Hannity.” “From that first trip down the escalator at Trump Tower,” the official went on, “Trump was able to literally speak like he was on ‘Hannity.’ ”As the primaries gave way to the general election, Hannity and Trump’s campaign staff were in touch on an almost-daily basis. “Occasionally, we’d talk on Sean’s show knowing Trump was watching,” Gingrich told me. “The two most effective ways of communicating with Trump are ‘Fox & Friends’ and ‘Hannity.’ ”John Gomez, Hannity’s old friend, who traveled with him on several legs of his Republican primary tour, recalled that Hannity saw something of himself in the president. “Sean knows that there’s nothing better in radio than that shocking moment, that moment that freezes you,” Gomez told me. Trump did what other politicians wouldn’t. “They’re afraid to state a controversial point. That bugs Sean.”Bill Shine told me that when it came to the opinion side of the Fox News operation, Hannity was “early on, pretty [much] first” when it came to vocal support of Trump. This put the host at odds with a sizable portion of the Fox News brass, along with Rupert Murdoch, who, according to Murdoch’s biographer, Michael Wolff, had advised Ailes to “tilt to anyone but Trump,” even if that anyone was Hillary Clinton. The vehemently anti-Clinton Hannity was not about to let that happen. (Ailes, after leaving Fox News, later joined the Trump campaign as a debate adviser.)Hannity spoke directly to Trump during the campaign. “I was a little bit of a liaison,” he says, between the Trump camp and Fox News. In August 2015, Hannity’s colleague Megyn Kelly asked Trump at a Fox News-sponsored debate to account for his derogatory comments about women. “I say this just very objectively: I thought the question was patently unfair,” Hannity told me. In “Devil’s Bargain,” his book on Bannon and Trump, the Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Joshua Green writes that Trump phoned Hannity the weekend after the debate, threatening to boycott Fox. Shortly thereafter, he tweeted: “Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on @FoxNews.”Kelly has since decamped to NBC, but the fissures exposed during the 2016 campaign have widened. “Back in the day, Roger had this saying: ‘You don’t piss inside the tent,’ ” a longtime Fox employee told me. But since Ailes’s death, in May, news-side stars have sniped publicly at hosts like Hannity. In November, Shepard Smith used his afternoon show to throw cold water on the theory — one given extensive airtime by Hannity — that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, orchestrated a sale of uranium to Russia in exchange for a donation to the Clinton Foundation. (Through a spokeswoman, Smith denied he’d been referring to Hannity, and said he and Hannity “respected one another’s roles at the channel.”) And Chris Wallace, the veteran anchor, recently complained, in comments widely seen as directed at Hannity, about some of his colleagues’ propensity for attacking the rest of the media. “Bad form,” Wallace told The Associated Press.The problem for Fox News is that while Hannity has risen to become the top ratings-earner of the nightly lineup, he is also a figure prone to barreling headfirst into the murky territory between opinion and out-and-out conspiracy theorism. And Fox executives frequently have been forced to juggle advertiser discontent with the need to ensure that Hannity, whose contract allows him to depart Fox with no notice, does not leave for a rival network, like Sinclair Broadcast Group, a right-leaning owner of local TV stations.In November, Alvin Chang, a writer for Vox, crunched data from two years of Hannity TV transcripts and concluded that Hannity was, in his mentions of topics like “the deep state” and the uranium deal, the media’s “top conspiracy theorist.” In our conversations, Hannity rejected the label, calling it a “typical left-wing attack. My whole career I’ve pursued the truth and have been proven right time after time while my colleagues are often dead wrong.” And to watch Hannity regularly is to observe how distant the host is from a figure like the Infowars proprietor Alex Jones. Jones endorses theories; Hannity almost never does, leaving that job to his guests. It is a dance that has the effect of nourishing the more wild-eyed beliefs of his fans while providing Hannity a degree of plausible deniability.
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This approach was on full display during the 2016 election, when Hannity invited a doctor to analyze Hillary Clinton’s health on the basis of video footage. (“That looks like violent, out of control movements on her part,” Hannity suggested hopefully.) And it was most infamously evident in his coverage of the case of Seth Rich, a young staff member at the Democratic National Committee murdered in July 2016, in what Washington police say was a street robbery gone bad. But others, like the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, soon began suggesting that Rich had been killed in retaliation for the leaking of sensitive internal D.N.C. emails. This February, a prominent Trump supporter, Ed Butowsky, offered to bankroll a former Washington homicide detective and Fox News contributor named Rod Wheeler to look into the case; according to court documents in a continuing federal lawsuit brought by Wheeler, he and Butowsky later met with Sean Spicer, then the White House press secretary, and briefed him on the story.For Hannity, Wheeler’s investigation did double duty as drama and political cudgel: If Rich was involved in the leaks, then the contention that Russia had undertaken the hack on behalf of Trump would be discredited. And on May 16, he invited Wheeler onto “Hannity.” “Is there any evidence,” Hannity asked, that Rich “might have been disgruntled by the treatment of Bernie Sanders and the unfairness, and that the fix was in, to put Hillary in that position” as the Democratic presidential candidate, “and maybe had evidence of that?” Wheeler demurred, but said that his investigation had uncovered proof that Rich was “having problems” at the D.N.C. “So connect the dots here,” Wheeler suggested. (In his lawsuit, Wheeler claims that the Trump administration and Fox News conspired to push the Rich story on air. Butowsky denies many allegations within the lawsuit and has filed a motion to have it dismissed.)After Rich’s family demanded an apology and a retraction from Fox News, Hannity stopped mentioning Rich on the air, and he declined to discuss the case directly with me. But he has also tweeted that he is still looking into the circumstances of Rich’s death: “Ok TO BE CLEAR, I am closer to the TRUTH than ever. Not only am I not stopping, I am working harder. Updates when available.” He visited Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, and he told me that he has continued to exchange messages with Kim Dotcom, a New Zealand-based fugitive internet entrepreneur and another proponent of the Rich-as-D.N.C.-leaker story. “There is a much deeper story yet to be heard,” he said.Hannity’s intransigence is Trumpian in its effectiveness: By backing off on reporting on Fox News about Rich, but maintaining his contention that there “is something going on,” he is effectively having it both ways. At least until a killer is found, he will never have to admit he is wrong. And Trump will continue to be the beneficiary.Photo
Hannity at Carmela’s Ristorante Italiano in Franklin Square, N.Y.
Credit
Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
One Sunday evening this fall, Hannity sat in the back room of Chris & Tony’s, an Italian restaurant in a strip mall off Jericho Turnpike, in Syosset, a Long Island town. Hannity visits Chris & Tony’s regularly, and he ordered without looking at the menu — baked clams, Kobe beef meatballs, a cheese-covered dish he informed me was known as Heroin Chicken. He poked at the meat hesitantly. At 55, Hannity is increasingly worried about his weight; he recently switched to light beer, and he has upped the frequency of his workouts with his martial-arts trainer, Glenn Rubin.“We have days we call ‘keeping it real,’ ” he said. “And keeping it real is like this guy who’s so big and so strong, and he’s coming up to me all throughout an hour-and-15-minute session and putting me in chokeholds, seeing how I respond to a gun to my head. You know, how do I deal with blades? And then another day is pain day, and then literally you put out your arms, ‘Boom, boom, boom.’ ” He mimed a hammer-punching motion against his forearm and stomach. “It’s made me stronger than I’ve ever been in my life.”A waiter appeared with two more pints of beer. When he left, Hannity gestured toward him. “I’m no different to all the service businesses,” he said. It was a theme he returned to frequently, his enduring fixation on consumer demand — what made people angry or happy, what turned them on or off. Hannity, who was recently inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, told me he continues to pay for his own focus-group surveys of his radio and television shows: What he seems to fear more than anything else is the prospect of a fan picking up the remote.For now, he has little to worry about. During the Moore scandal, he ascended to the top of the cable-news ratings heap. In the weeks after our first meeting, I kept in close touch with Hannity by text. As John Gomez, Hannity’s longtime friend, had warned me, Hannity appears to be constitutionally unable not to answer his phone, and the messages often arrived at night — “asleep at 11 p.m.?” read one chiding text — or even on commercial breaks from his television show.
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Sometimes, Hannity would preview segments to me, offering the broad arguments that he would refine and repeat that night. “Remember trump lost VA and NJ. No shock,” he texted after Republican losses in races for governor in those states; that night on the air, he repeated the words almost verbatim. “Massive boomerang coming back on Dems on Russia,” he texted before a segment on the purported uranium deal; a few days later, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s office announced it would consider appointing a special counsel to look into the supposed deal. The influence obviously thrilled him, as did the reactions it could provoke. “I say it,” he texted, “and it’s gone. Then liberals bubble and fizz and give off steam like Alka-Seltzer in water.”
In October, Hannity flew to Middletown, Pa., to interview Trump in advance of a rally to gin up support for tax reform. Sitting inches from the president, Hannity covered the biggest issues of the day, serving as rudder and prompt — steering Trump gently to friendly terrain. The new tax cuts, Trump said, would be “massive”; working-class Pennsylvanians were “incredible”; health care reform would be “great”; and Democratic policies were “terrible,” an adjective the president went on to apply to Colin Kaepernick, the education system and the urban crime rate.Hannity, smiling solicitously throughout, let the roar of the crowd stand in for his response.“I will say this,” Trump told his friend, before leaving the stage. “You have been so great. And I’m very proud of you.”Continue reading the main story
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