After months of turmoil that have shaken up much of the Fox News primetime line-up, Sean Hannity seems to be reveling in the drama surrounding his own contentious tenure. “Uh oh My ANNUAL Memorial Day long weekend starts NOW,” he tweeted Wednesday night, shortly before the network released its own statement confirming that Hannity would be going on vacation and not returning until Tuesday. “Destroy Trump/Conservative media breathless coverage starts! Did Hannity do last show?”
Hannity’s practically gleeful, mocking tone could not be more discordant with the controversy currently hanging over his head. This week, at least a half-dozen companies pulled their ads from his show after he continued to fuel a conspiracy theory about the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer who Hannity and others on the far-right have have suggested, without evidence, was the true source for the thousands of stolen files later published by Wikileaks. The implication is that Rich, not Russia, hacked the D.N.C.—and that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, is the story’s true villain.
Despite CNN debunking the story, impassioned pleas from the Rich family for Hannity to stop spreading conspiracy theories about Seth, and Fox News ultimately retracting its own online story on the subject after finding that “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting,” Hannity refused to relent—until Tuesday, when he said on air that he would temporarily stop covering the story “out of respect for the family’s wishes,” but that he would continue to seek the truth.
Whether Hannity’s hint of contrition is enough to detoxify his show remains to be seen. While USAA, Crowne Plaza Hotels, Cars.com, and Ring are among the companies that have pulled their ads, the blowback is nothing close to the 50-plus advertisers who cancelled their ads on Bill O’Reilly’s show last month before he was ultimately ousted from the network. More advertisers may follow, thanks to a push from the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, which Hannity considers his mortal enemy. (“There’s nothing that I did, nothing that I said, except they don’t like my position politically,” he complained to The Huffington Post. “They’ll try to ratchet up the intensity of their rationale. It does not justify an attempt to get me fired. And that’s what this is. This is an attempt to take me out. This is a kill shot.”) But Hannity’s show has often crossed the line before, and, if he returns, will almost certainly do so again.
Fox News, for its part, insists Hannity will be back to hosting his eponymous show Tuesday night, capping a nightly lineup that has already lost O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly, leaving Hannity the sole remaining member of the network’s original 2013-2017 primetime cast. While CNN reports that network brass had to intervene this week to get Hannity to lay off the Rich story, a statement from the network warned speculators that people who suggest Hannity won’t return “are going to look foolish.”
Hannity, meanwhile, pushed back against the implication that anyone had gotten him to lay off anything. “NOBODY told me to say it. Destroy Trump media lies,” he tweeted.
