Fox News host Sean Hannity, who works at a network that has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars for lying to its audience, decried lying in the mainstream media in a recent interview.
“That’s why legacy media is dead. They don’t know it yet because they don’t tell the truth,” Hannity told Mediaite while promoting his new interview show on the streaming service Fox Nation, which has aired made-up stories for years.
During the interview where he complained about the “legacy media” promoting falsehoods, Hannity also argued that the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not instigated by Donald Trump.
Interviewer Aidan McLaughlin noted that the riot “was directly the consequence of Trump saying that the election was stolen.” In response, Hannity asked, “Are you sure of that?”
Trump not only instigated the riot—promoting it with a tweet about how the protest against certifying Joe Biden’s election would be “wild”—but was impeached and later charged for his role in launching the unprecedented attack on the Capitol. Yet Hannity said Trump is the injured party.
“As far as I’m concerned, they all owe him an apology for how they treated him and the lies and conspiracy theories they peddled,” he whined.
Hannity is not unfamiliar with how Fox News operates. He has been at the network since 1996, where he was one of the first people hired by founder Roger Ailes, the deceased serial sexual assaulter. Hannity knows that Fox News paid out nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after it was sued for airing multiple falsehoods about the 2020 election.
If a lie aired on Fox News, not only was Hannity probably aware of it, but it is also highly likely that he was the one spouting it. Over the last nearly 30 years, Hannity has lied often on his Fox News show.
Hannity platformed multiple false and unhinged pro-Trump claims about the election, leading him to be named in the Dominion lawsuit. Similarly, he repeatedly offered up his show to be a platform for the racist anti-Barack Obama “birther” conspiracy popularized by Trump.
Hannity lied and claimed that Obama called Americans “lazy,” lied and alleged that the Obama administration didn’t declare a health emergency after the outbreak of bird flu, lied and claimed that Trump put security measures in place before Jan. 6, and argued that he warned his TV audience about the dangers of using ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment—but he didn’t.
One of Hannity’s biggest lies was repeatedly promoting conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Why? Because Hannity wanted to smear Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign.
The “legacy media,” as Hannity calls it, does have many problems. But many of those issues are related to how the mainstream media defers to conservatives and the Republican Party, and not so-called “liberal media bias.”
So it strains credulity for someone like Hannity, who is so connected to the serial lying at Fox News, to declare himself on the side of truth. That especially applies to someone who has such close ties to Donald Trump, one of the most well-known liars and conspiracy theorists in American history.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
