Sean Hannity Addresses the Media, and Explains What Exactly His Role Is

By A.J. Katz 

Sean Hannity was speaking about border security during last night’s broadcast when all of a sudden he made a 180, and addressed the media.

Just a side note: All of you in the media – I don’t know why everyone’s been obsessed…”Hannity’s predicting this, Hannity’s predicting that.” That’s what I’m predicting is going to happen. Because I actually listen to the publicly stated words of the president.

So keep speculating. Nobody in the media has any idea of whom my sources are, who they’re not; who I talk to, who I don’t talk to; and I will not reveal my sources.

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And all these “Hate Trump” media outlets – They all pretend they’re unbiased, that they’re journalists. Well, I don’t claim to be a journalist. We do journalism. What we say about being a talk show host… we’re like the whole newspaper. We do straight news when there’s a war. Straight news on weather. Straight news important incidents that are happening –  like Ferguson when that was happening, or Baltimore.

And then we give a lot of opinion. The news page, the editorial page, the opinion page. We even do gossip and sports, like tonight for example, Tim Tebow is on.

So we’re like the whole newspaper. That’s what we do, freedom of the press.  But we identify what we do.

Now, we do our own research, like we did with vetting Obama. Like we did with the deep state. We do investigation you won’t hear or see anywhere else, and opinion you won’t get anywhere else.

But all these “Hate Trump” newspeople that claim to be journalists…no, they’re really editorial writers and ones that make up a lot of BS at the same time.

It is unclear why Hannity devoted these 100 or so seconds to this topic last night. It could have been in response to a story from New York Times’ Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman published earlier in the day, stating that Trump aides fear criticism from conservative TV hosts like Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity if the president accepts the bipartisan border deal.

Baker and Haberman write:

One call was made to Lou Dobbs, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s whose Fox Business Network show he often tries to catch live. Another was placed to Sean Hannity, the Fox host who regularly talks with the president. The message: Mr. Trump deserved support because he still forced concessions that he would never have gotten without a five-week partial government shutdown.

Or perhaps Hannity’s remarks had nothing to do with that, and this was purely something he wanted to get off of his chest.

Regardless, what the Fox Newser said on his program last night is quite similar to what he told Adweek when we spoke with him for the magazine’s Top 30 TV Newsers issue earlier this year:

If you ask me what I do for a living, I will tell you I’m a talk show host, and I do straight news reporting on plenty of topics very often, on radio and TV; straight up covering a hurricane; straight up covering a war. That’s reporting. I’m also going to do investigative reporting. I also do strong “opinion.” I do other things as well, like sports sometimes, pop culture issues. The analogy I use is: I’m a newspaper, and I’m telling you upfront that I’m going to do reporting, investigative reporting, “opinion,” and I think everyone is trying to sell themselves as journalists, and they’re not. They are “opinion people” who pose as journalists. There has been a massive shift in the lines in terms of what people call journalism and what that used to represent.

I think I’m more honest than they are. I’m upfront about who I am, what I do. It’s very clear demarcation if I’m just doing news that night and asking important questions that any good reporter would ask, then I’m giving an opening monologue full of my opinions that are based on facts and information. Everything I do gets checked.

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