They can’t stand the truth. So they can’t stand Sean Hannity. And they really can’t stand something that is now abundantly obvious.
The vindication of Sean Hannity.
Among the many things the witch hunt to get President Donald Trump has brought to light is the Leftist State Media’s aversion to facts — and to any serious investigative reporting that uncovers those facts.
For month after month after month since the Trump election, Hannity has, with a disciplined patience, used both his radio and television shows to provide a forum for the kind of relentlessly detailed investigative reporting for which the Washington Post was once famous when uncovering the Watergate scandal.
The real scandal today in the media — and it is a scandal — is that it was Sean Hannity and Sean Hannity alone who insisted on providing the platform and getting at the truth about what did — and did not — happen in the mad, obsessive drive by Washington elites to bring down a president.
With reporters — reporters who are serious journalists — like John Solomon and Sara Carter, Fox’s Gregg Jarrett and the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel, not to mention what Hannity has come to call his “ensemble cast” of lawyers, writers, and others, he has been the proverbial dog with a bone.
It is nothing short of stunning that other media outlets — from CNN and MSNBC to ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — all out to get the president, repeatedly ignored not only the facts behind the FBI–DOJ attempt at a coup d’état but even — make that especially even — turned their backs on the opportunity to get the facts.
Recall, if of a certain age, the famous mantra of the old TV and radio show Dragnet, in which the terse detective hero from the Los Angeles police department, Sergeant Joe Friday, investigating yet another crime, would say:
All we want are the facts, ma’am.
In essence, this became Hannity’s mantra as one fact after another after another was uncovered by his ensemble cast.
Journalist Michael Tracey, retweeted by Fox’s Brit Hume, captures exactly what has been going on in this get-Trump mainstream media frenzy. Tracey said,
The Steele Dossier, and the sequence of events it sparked, represent such a massive media / law enforcement failure that the implicated parties will never accept responsibility so long as Trump is around. It’s just not within their capacity. Deny, deny, deny is all they can do.
Exactly. I would add that they not only deny their failure but also actually blame Hannity for doing the job they themselves have refused to do. It is no overstatement to say that the mainstream media is guilty of professional malpractice.
Take this March 2018 New Yorker piece by Establishment reporter Jane Mayer. It is a priceless example of just how in the tank this Leftist State Media publication was for the now-infamous Steele dossier. The piece is an adoring profile of ex-British spy Christopher Steele, and it assails Hannity this way:
Sean Hannity charged that Steele’s dossier was “claptrap” filled with “Russian lies” that were intended to poison “our own intelligence and law-enforcement network” against Trump.
Over at CNN, White House correspondent Jim Acosta was so incensed at Hannity’s pursuit of the truth he took to Twitter to say Hannity “was a propagandist for profit, peddling lies every night.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter made a point of saying this last month. The headline in Mediaite read this way:
CNN’s Stelter: After Damning Impeachment Evidence, Hannity ‘Just Presented a Completely Different Set of Facts’
He began by reading this from the Associated Press:
After two weeks of riveting public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, there is a mountain of evidence that is now beyond dispute.
That, obviously — unless one is in the Leftist State Media as is the AP — is not fact. It is not news. It is opinion.
Then Stelter went on to say that
no matter how damning the evidence was (on impeachment) … Sean Hannity just presents a completely different set of facts.
Without the least sense of irony, the CNN Reliable Sources host then turned to former Fox News host Juliet Huddy, who answered that when she visits the homes of Trump-supporting relatives, their TVs are turned to Fox and their computers to Breitbart or the Hill, meaning, she says, that their news is “curated by a very specific agenda-driven narrative.” Stelter then went on to present side-by-side comparisons of NBC’s Lester Holt and Hannity discussing the same event, the testimony of the national security officials on the president’s phone call to the Ukrainian president. Holt is shown insisting there was a quid pro quo, Hannity saying the opposite. Holt is shown saying that it was a “conspiracy theory” that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 elections, Hannity is shown saying it was fact. Stelter, of course, sided with Holt. And it was Holt who was, to borrow from Huddy, curating the news to reflect the Leftist State Media’s agenda.
Over at MSNBC, the reporter John Heilemann said this (Foul language alert. Bold print supplied by NewsBusters):
This wasn’t some slip of the tongue. Appearing on Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show, Deadline: White House, this afternoon, John Heilemann warned that “I’m about to use some language that might need to be bleeped out.”
Heilemann then proceeded to use barnyard vulgarity to attack Fox News in general and Sean Hannity in particular:
“I yield to no one in my tendency to call ‘bulls**t’ on people at Fox News when they lie. And so, obviously, Sean’s full of it, right?… The political reality she [Nancy Pelosi] is confronting is the political reality created by Sean Hannity and his business model built on lies, and fantasy, and hypocrisy, and bulls**t.”
In short, in the course of his lengthy, relentless pursuit of truth and facts when it came to the role of the Obama FBI leadership, the Obama Department of Justice and CIA in this coup attempt against candidate and then President Trump, Hannity has been taking it on the chin precisely because he has been in pursuit of truth and facts. And the American people have been paying attention. Here is this report from, of course, Fox News. The first paragraph reads,
Fox News Channel enjoyed the best primetime ratings in the network’s 23-year history as “Hannity” topped cable news for the third straight year.
Now, finally, comes the inspector general’s report — and complete vindication for Hannity and his ensemble cast. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said this of IG Michael Horowitz’s report:
What’s been described as a few irregularities becomes a massive criminal conspiracy over time to defraud the FISA court, to illegally surveil an American citizen and keep an investigation open against a sitting president of the United States, violating every norm known to the rule of law.
Exactly.
And for the last three years Sean Hannity has made it his business to dig out the truth of all this, one bit of information at a time. Then, in the fashion of a giant jigsaw puzzle, he patiently put all the pieces together to see exactly what has been discovered.
What was discovered is the biggest political scandal in American history.
To say the least, this is one seriously big story all by itself. But rest assured — the vindication of Sean Hannity will never make the mainstream media.
