New Study Shows Hannity Has Blood On His Hands

Fox News is now afraid of lawsuits because many of their TV personalities lied to the public -- telling them the pandemic of Coronavirus was a hoax. They should be worried. A new study was done at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago.

The study compared the two most popular shows on Fox -- Sean Hannity (who called the pandemic a hoax and denied its danger to Americans) and Tucker Carlson (who was warning of the Coronavirus dangers fairly early). The two charts above show the difference between those who primarily watched Hannity and those who primarily watched Carlson.Note that Carlson's curve is much flatter than Hannity's -- meaning that fewer people got ill from the virus among those watching Carlson than those watching Hannity.

The obvious conclusion is that the viewers believed what they were being told -- and those who watched Hannity didn't social distance (or did it later) and many got sick (and many died). Those watching Carlson did social distance earlier and were thus more protected (with fewer getting sick and dying).

Here is a statement from the Becker Friedman Institute regarding their study:

We study the effects of news coverage of the novel coronavirus by the two most widely-viewed cable news shows in the United States – Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight, both on Fox News – on viewers’ behavior and downstream health outcomes. Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February. We first validate these differences in content with independent coding of show transcripts. In line with the differences in content, we present novel survey evidence that Hannity’s viewers changed behavior in response to the virus later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed behavior earlier. We then turn to the effects on the pandemic itself, examining health outcomes across counties. First, we document that greater viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is strongly associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic. The relationship is stable across an expansive set of robustness tests. To better identify the effect of differential viewership of the two shows, we employ a novel instrumental variable strategy exploiting variation in when shows are broadcast in relation to local sunset times. These estimates also show that greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with a greater number of county-level cases and deaths. Furthermore, the results suggest that in mid-March, after Hannity’s shift in tone, the diverging trajectories on COVID-19 cases begin to revert. We provide additional evidence consistent with misinformation being an important mechanism driving the effects in the data. While our findings cannot yet speak to long-term effects, they indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for how a disease ultimately affects the population.

Hannity Has No Regard For Basic Journalistic Ethics

Ever since the Justice Department got a search warrant and seized documents from Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, Sean Hannity of Fox News has been railing about it. He has called it a government effort to destroy the attorney-client privilege in this country.

It now turns out that he had a reason for attacking the seizure other than to protect Trump. It came out in court on Monday that Hannity is also one of Cohen's three clients in the last two years. And Hannity didn't want that information know (and had asked Cohen to keep it secret).

This is a clear violation of journalistic ethics. If a reporter or opinion editorialist has a personal stake in a story he/she is reporting, that connection must be revealed. Indira Lakshamanan, journalism ethics chair at the Poynter Institute, says:

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a newspaper reporter or an opinion journalist. If you want to maintain credibility with an audience, and be honest with them, you have to disclose all facts.”

Of course, Hannity is trying to squirm out of it. But he wants to have his cake and eat it also. He is denying that he was a client while asking that his attorney-client privilege be respected. That's not going to fly. It just shows he has as little regard for the truth as he does for journalistic ethics.

Some are calling for Hannity to be fired, and if Fox News was a real news organization that might make sense. But it's not. It's a right-wing propaganda organ, and it has shown that it doesn't have any more respect for truth or journalistic ethics than Hannity does.

UPDATE -- MSNBC has revealed that Cohen is not the only Trump attorney that Hannity has dealt with. He has also used Jay Sekulow and Victoria Toensing, and had them on his show without revealing that. Hannity's ethical hole keeps getting deeper.

Rush Limbaugh To Moderate GOP Debate ?

(This caricature of Rush Limbaugh is by the wonderful DonkeyHotey.)

This is hard to believe, but the Washington Times is reporting that the Republican Party is considering a change in the selection of moderators for their presidential candidate debates. Instead of selecting respected (and nonpartisan) journalists to moderate those debates, as has been done in the past, they are considering asking Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh to do the honors.

It seems that the national party believes they had too many debates in the last presidential election (probably true), and that the moderators of those debates were not always fair to their candidates. Evidently, they asked too many hard questions (which did not show those candidates in the best light). Party insiders say they plan to fix that by letting the purveyors of right-wing radio (Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity) moderate the primary debates.

Personally, I think that's a great idea -- and I'm sure that most Democrats would agree. While the far right might enjoy watching their hate-radio heroes lob softball questions at the GOP candidates, I think it would just scare the hell out of most Americans. It would conclusively tie the party (and their eventual candidate) to Rush Limbaugh and his ultra-right-wing cohorts, and remove any remaining doubt as to who is really running the Republican Party.

The fact that this is even being considered by the Republican Party shows that they still don't understand the electorate (and why they lost bad in the last two national elections). They seem to think the electorate is as ultra-conservative as they are, and if they just present their ultra-right views in the right way, the public will come around and vote for them. They are wrong. Most Americans are moderates, and don't like the extreme views of the right or left.

I hope the Republican Party does this. It will appeal only to the voters they already have, and drive most voters further away from them.

Advertisers Avoiding Rush Like The Plague

(This caricature of Rush Limbaugh is by DonkeyHotey.)

I'm sure Rush Limbaugh thought it would be a short-term problem when advertisers starting leaving his show in droves. Things would die down, and the advertisers would return. But that hasn't happened. According to one executive at Cumulus Media, 48 out of 50 of their biggest advertisers now require that their advertising on that network not be played on the show of Rush Limbaugh (or his right-wing buddy Sean Hannity). This means Rush Limbaugh is not the money machine that he once was for the radio stations carrying his show.

Will Rush survive? He well could, because there are still a lot of right-wing nuts that listen to him. But with the radio stations bleeding money during his show's hours, you can bet that Rush's next contract won't be nearly as lucrative as his last one. After all, the primary reason these stations exist is to make money -- and they won't pay him huge money if they can't sell advertising on his show. Here's how Media Matters sums up the current situation:

As numerous members of the conservative movement flee from the Heritage Foundation's flawed immigration study, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh has maintained a stalwart defense of the organization.

Not a surprise considering Rush Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, is the single largest independent contractor to the Heritage Foundation according to their latest 990 filing with the IRS, receiving $2,236,555 from the think tank.

With advertisers fleeing his show, and as a result radio companies suffering major losses, the fiscal sponsorship of the conservative movement is now fiscally critical. A "very high ranking" official at Cumulus, the owner of Rush and Sean Hannity's flagship station WABC, told Radio Ink, "Forty-eight of the top 50 network advertisers have 'excluded Rush and Hannity' orders. Every major national ad agency has the same dictate."

Without wingnut welfare, which has also included sponsorships from FreedomWorks, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity's shows would not be financially viable.

The financial relationship between the conservative movement and its radio hosts has existed for years -- Heritage has been a major sponsor of Premiere Radio talent, specifically Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, according to a 2011 report by Ken Vogel of Politico -- however with Limbaugh and Hannity's recent well publicized problems attracting sponsorship to their programs the role of the conservative movement is not rightwing radios key sponsor.

Ratings Drop Sharply For Hannity At Fox

The two most popular commentators on Fox News, by far, are Bill O'Reilly (who gets about 4.1 million viewers) and Sean Hannity (who gets slightly less than 4 million viewers). Fox already had O'Reilly locked into a long-term contract, and last April they moved to do the same for Hannity. Although the salary numbers were not released, it is known that Hannity has been signed through the 2016 campaign season at least. This had the Fox News executives feeling pretty smug -- at least until the election debacle that was totally misjudged by Fox commentators.

For months before the election, Hannity preached to his viewers that Willard Mitt Romney was a lock to win the election, and he brought on a whole cadre of right-wingers to back up his perception. Even when polls began to show that Romney was falling short of expectations, especially in the critical swing states, Hannity keep up his misguided prediction (saying the polls were skewed and Romney was really ahead). It is because of this total misreading of the American electorate by Hannity and his Fox News cohorts, that right-wingers (who depend exclusively on Fox for their "news") were so shocked at the real thumping the Republicans received on election night.

Now Fox News might be regretting the long contract they gave Hannity, because it looks like a large part of his audience has abandoned him (perhaps angry because he was so badly wrong about the election). Hannity's December numbers have dropped from nearly 4 million viewers to around 1.95 million viewers. That's a drop in his rating of nearly 50%. And that's not all of the bad news. In the 25 to 54 age demographic (the group most coveted by advertisers), the drop was even more -- falling more than 50%.

In addition, for the first time at least two of the MSNBC commentators have received ratings higher than Hannity's. Those commentators are Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. A few months ago, most people would not have thought that was possible.

O'Reilly fared a little better than Hannity did. His viewership only dropped by about 30%. The December ratings show he lost about 1.1 million viewers. It's starting to look like even right-wingers don't appreciate being lied to and told that things are going their way when the opposite is true.

Is Right-Wing Hate Radio Dying ?

Although right-wingers like to claim that the media is against them, that is simply not true. Not only do they have a television "news" network that spouts right-wing propaganda 24 hours a day (Fox News), but they haven't had any problem in getting their views on any of the other television news networks either. The mis-named "liberal media" have been very kind to right-wingers in recent years.

But the most reliable proponent of right-wing hate talk for quite a while now has been talk radio. Talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and others have for years spewed a daily diet of fringe right-wing hate talk (and their audience was large enough to make them all rich doing it). But there are signs now that the era of right-wing hate radio may be coming to an end.

Several months ago markets in places like Salt Lake City and Philadelphia dropped radio shows by Hannity and Beck (including the station in Philadelphia where Beck got his start). That was a clue that something was happening to right-wing talk radio. Now we learn that last Fall the number of listeners dropped precipitously (in spite of a campaign where the right was energized), and these hate-talkers have been unable to boost the numbers since then.

The ratings people are saying that Hannity and Levin have lost 28% of their listeners. It has been even worse for Rush Limbaugh -- a drop of about 33%. And Glenn Beck is down nearly 50%. Those are some huge losses, and it's starting to worry the station managers.

And to make matters even worse, the listener demographic is not the one that most advertisers want (the 18 to 54 age group). It seems that most of the listeners of right-wing talk radio are older people -- and as they die off they are not being replaced by younger listeners. In fact, the younger the listener, the less likely they are tuning in to right-wing talk radio.

But it's not just that these hate-talk jockeys can't replace their older viewers. It seems that many people have just tired of the same old hate-talk every day. As one industry insider pointed out, you can only say "Obama is a socialist" so many times and then people tire of hearing it (even many who believe it).

There are still enough listeners to keep hate talk radio going for a while, but the question now is how long? How long will it be before the advertisers decide their money is spent better in other venues? When that happens (and it looks like it coming) right-wing hate talk radio will die. And this country will be better for that.

Sean Hannity - A Real Con Man

While right-wing whackos like Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin have been getting all the headlines recently, some others like Sean Hannity have been sort of flying under the radar. Now it turns out that Hannity may be the biggest con man of them all -- a real con man bilking his fans out of millions of dollars in a fake charity.

Hannity created a charity called Freedom Alliance. According to Hannity, this charity was to help soldiers who had been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan and to help pay for college for their children. To fund the charity, he held "Freedom concerts" across the country where the entertainers performed for nothing (and even paid their own way to get to the venue). He also sent out form letters asking for donations, and those letters promised that 100% of the money raised would be used to help the soldiers and their children.

To their credit, Hannity's right-wing fans fed millions of dollars into the charity through the concerts and the donations. There was only one problem. Very little of the money was getting to the military victims of the wars and their children. For a charity to be valid, at least 75% of the money raised must go toward helping the intended charity recipients (and most of the better charities do even better than that). But the intended recipients of Hannity's charity didn't receive anything even close to 75% of donations.

The great bulk of the donated money was spent on staff, advisors, form letters, postage, etc. At least $200,000 of the money raised at each concert was spent to fly Hannity, his family and friends to the concerts, rent limousines to ferry them around, and rooms at expensive hotels for them to stay in. Here are the figures for donations and money given to intended recipients according to the charity's tax forms:

2006

$10,822,785 in donations received

3.68% went to intended recipients

2007

$12,459,317 in donations received

7.19% went to intended recipients

2008

$8,781,431 in donations received

12.07% went to intended recipients

Folks, this is not a charity. This is a SCAM! While a few wounded soldiers and their children received a pittance, Hannity and his employees and advisors have been living high on the hog off the rest. How can this qualify as a charity when, at most, only 12% of donations actually went to the intended purpose?

Now some of you may be thinking this is just another left-wing attack on that great patriot Sean Hannity. Not so! The investigation that exposed Hannity's con game was done by right-wing columnist and blogger Debbie Schlussel. I invite you to go to her web site, where she has much more on Hannity's scam.

Schlussel puts it well when she says:

"You’ve heard the saying, 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' I love patriotism, but in this case, Sean Hannity’s “Freedom Concerts” and the Freedom Alliance are Exhibit A of that saying. But they’re not really patriots. Not even close. Their only patriotism is to the faces they see in their mirrors."