The face in the 15-year-old clip looks choir-boy young and innocent. The “crawl” across the bottom of the screen, now so de rigeur everywhere on TV, is nowhere to be seen. And the — gasp! — liberal co-host gets equal billing and opportunity to throw verbal punches.
This archived footage of Sean Hannity’s first moments on Fox News Channel is undeniably entertaining to watch.
Unless, that is, you happen to be Sean Hannity.
“I couldn’t watch it,” Hannity moaned recently during a lengthy phone interview from New York. “If you paid me $10 million, I couldn’t watch it. Every time they put it in, I hide under my chair.”
For all the inherent ironies in that statement — Hannity reportedly makes $20 million a year from his radio show alone — the biggest one may be this: He’s pretty much alone under that chair. Not many people look away from Hannity or Fox News these days.
That point will be driven home Thursday night when “Hannity” broadcasts live from Centennial Olympic Park. Billed as a 15th anniversary celebration — both Fox News and “Hannity & Colmes” (its original iteration) debuted on Oct. 7, 1996 — it marks a triumphant return to Atlanta by Hannity, who went directly from his first major market radio job here at WGST-AM (640) to Fox News.
“Some of the best years of my life were spent there,” Hannity said with sincerity.
The public event is also a mischievous and not-so-subtle “So there!” directed at CNN, which overlooks the park and essentially invented 24-hour cable news back in 1980.
“Early on, our M.O. was to not be CNN,” recalled Bill Shine, Fox’s senior vice president of programming, who started out as producer of “Hannity & Colmes” in 1996. “I guess that is kind of our M.O. today.”
Always the upstart
Even now, as it closes in on 10 consecutive years as the No. 1-rated cable news network and has become so established that no Democratic politician dares not go on its airwaves, Fox can’t resist continuing to tweak its enemies, real or perceived.
Hannity, meanwhile, exists in a veritable “No Tweak Zone.” There, the 49-year-old host’s views are never in doubt. And he bears scant resemblance to the somewhat uncertain figure of those early days when he was, he says, “just trying to survive the show.”
Now he is the show. He’s the poster boy for Fox News’ stunning success — and one of the guys who helped design the poster to begin with.
Many others have tried and failed, including Hannity’s co-host Alan Colmes (he left in 2008), and Glenn Beck, who lasted two years on Fox.
“It’s not easy,” Richard Hanley, an assistant journalism professor at Quinnipiac University and occasional guest on MSNBC and Fox News, said of Hannity’s position. “No matter what you might think of his views, or whether you think he skews some facts or not, to be on a show like that night after night 15 years is a remarkable achievement.”
GOP kingmaker?
Hannity is poised for an even bigger role in the months ahead. As the 2012 Republican primary season looms and the nine announced candidates (not counting the Hamlet of Wasilla, Sarah Palin) frantically vie for attention like it’s open audition day on “American Idol,” “Hannity,” with its nearly 2.1 million viewers per night (second only to Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” in cable news programs), is the coveted time slot. The reliably conservative host’s sure-handed commentary and occasionally tart questioning can significantly raise or lower a candidate’s profile among GOP primary voters.
Last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was the latest hopeful to bow to Hannity’s altar, sitting down on “Hannity” for his first national TV interview since joining the presidential race.
It’s too early to decide who he wants the Republican nominee to be, Hannity said. But never too soon to declare that Barack Obama shouldn’t be re-elected.
“I think we are seeing a presidency literally crumble before our eyes,” Hannity said, his tone becoming agitated. “His policies have been an utter disaster! His model has failed. He’s Jimmy Carter on steroids!”
Anything else?
“My role [in the 2012 race] is I would like to see him defeated and be a one-term president. As a conservative commentator, I would like to see that happen.”
Watchable ‘Crossfire’
It’s just that kind of talk that makes “Hannity” appointment television for Steen Kirby of Lilburn.
“Sean’s show is more informationally oriented than some others,” said Kirby, 15, political director of the High School Democrats of Georgia. “I think he believes what he says. And what he says matters.”
He even finds Hannity “entertaining” at times. Still, it must be asked: What’s a nice young Democrat doing watching a show whose host describes himself as a “passionate Reagan conservative”?
“For me, it’s important to know what the other side is using for their talking points,” said Kirby, who was 5 months old when Fox News went on the air.
“If we Democrats or folks on the left don’t know what the Republicans are thinking, we can’t refute their ideas.”
Who would have foreseen such future influence when Hannity — whose only previous TV experience was as a guest on CNN’s “Talk Back Live” and the occasional Saturday night substitute hosting gig on CNBC — went on the air the night Fox News launched to 17 million subscribers?
Certainly not Hannity.
“I was so bad I should’ve been fired,” he says now. “Today I’d have to immediately grow into the job on the spot or be fired. That was the blessing of the time I came up.”
“Hannity & Colmes” averaged only 173,000 viewers in Fox’s first full rated year by Nielsen Media Research. Initially, anyway, the show’s ambitions appeared similarly modest: to be a more watchable version of “Crossfire.”
“They did the left-right thing, so we were going to do the left-right thing,” Shine recalled. “We just watched and did almost the opposite of what they did. Their scripts were a little Washington snooty. We were in New York, so we decided to have a little more fun.”
Fox’s meteoric rise
From the start, though, Hannity was deadly serious about Fox News’ mission. Roger Ailes may have plucked him from Atlanta’s WGST and turned him into the conservative pinup TV guy he is today. But that’s not why Hannity calls the Fox chairman and CEO a “visionary.”
Hannity says Ailes, a onetime consultant to the Nixon and Reagan presidential campaigns, recognized that “there was biased reporting all over the media.”
“He saw a vacuum and a need, an overwhelmingly liberal media and he said, ‘That’s going to change.’ ”
With Hannity’s nightly drumbeat of conservative commentary, it did — and much more quickly than many experts could have predicted.
“I thought they would struggle and be relegated to back-of-the-room status,” said Jeffrey McCall, a DePauw University communications professor who wrote the book “Viewer Discretion Advised: Taking Control of Mass Media Influences” on news organizations. “I was shocked by how quickly they came to dominate the ratings and the airwaves.”
Death of journalism
Yet change apparently hasn’t come fast enough or gone far enough for Hannity’s liking. During an interview lasting more than one hour, the smoothly confident, occasionally caustic commentator so familiar from television and radio, gave way to a humble, affable personality seemingly determined to downplay his role in his own success. The only time he sounded particularly aggrieved was when discussing the “pass” he felt most of the media had given to Obama during the last election cycle.
He himself had asked plenty of tough questions about the Democrat’s associations with controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright and Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, Hannity said. But he didn’t feel he had much company. And he doubts the media will show the same deference to Perry, Mitt Romney and company this time around.
“There wasn’t a lot made of the president’s drug use that he wrote about in his book, he wasn’t asked much about Bill Ayers,” said Hannity, noting how the media have been all over Perry about his comparison of Social Security to a Ponzi scheme. “The only reason I’m bringing up this issue is watch how hard the questions from the media are going to be with all the Republican candidates. And Barack Obama was only asked once about Bill Ayers.”
There was also this: “I declare journalism died in 2008 with the lack of tough questioning of Barack Obama.”
And this: “The only difference between Fox and other media is they allow conservatives to be heard.”
A reasonable person might quibble with that, pointing out that CNN employs RedState.com’s Erick Erickson and former George W. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer as contributors and just produced a GOP presidential debate with the tea party, for Pete’s sake. Or that MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” namesake host, Joe Scarborough, received a 95 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union during his four terms as a Florida congressman.
But it’s hard to argue that Fox didn’t fill an audience need when it came along with its then-revolutionary formula of straight news coverage during the day and unapologetically opinionated talk at night.
“The audience had always been there, because talk radio preceded [the launch of] Fox News,” said Quinnipiac’s Hanley. “Talk radio, which was very successful, was mostly conservative. This put a visual to it.”
And not just any visual.
“It wouldn’t have worked with just whomever — ‘Star Trek’ wouldn’t have been the same without the original Kirk and Spock,” Hanley pointed out. “Hannity’s clearly authentic and he works at being good at what he does. Whenever he has Bill Maher on, he’ll say, ‘I don’t agree with you on the issues, but I respect you because I know how hard it is to do this.’ ”
And it just keeps getting harder. Hannity’s one-note focus on certain topics makes him an object of continuing scorn among liberals and watchdog groups like Media Matters, which compiles clips documenting what it calls his “Bill Ayers Obsession.” (As recently as June 16, Hannity was at it again, telling his TV audience that Obama “would not qualify to be an FBI agent” because “he was hanging out with an unrepentant terrorist” — aka Ayers, the fellow college professor and neighbor of Obama’s who’d hosted a fundraiser for his first political campaign).
Loves the business
Meanwhile, Hannity’s own associations have occasionally caused problems. Last year, Fox News called him home from a planned broadcast from a tea party rally in Cincinnati, because the organizers were selling tickets to the event.
“Fox did the right thing and pulled me out,” said Hannity, claiming he hadn’t known anything about the fundraising aspect. “I was just going to be there. Fox is not the tea party. It’s a news organization and they can’t make money off of us.”
If having to watch his back more now bothers him, Hannity refuses to admit it.
He swears he’s still the same guy who does his daily radio and TV shows, then shuns the Manhattan night life and media social circuit to go home to Long Island.
His wife, Jill, is studying for her master’s in divinity. He spends his weekends shuttling their 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter to tennis matches and occasionally contemplating how nothing’s really changed for him professionally.
“It’s amazing, when I look back on this being an anniversary and all the events I covered, what stands out is the one thing I love is the news business,” Hannity said. “This is my passion. I am a news junkie who would do all this without being paid.”
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