Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Shawn Hannity

Hannity's grandparents were Irish immigrants who are believed to be sympathisers with the Irish Terrorist Organisation, the Irish Republican Army. He was a general contractor and a bar tender before he became a political "expert". He grew up in Franklin Square, New York and barely made it through high school at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary high school and graduated at 19 yrs. old. He has no education beyond high school and scoffs at anyone who does. He lived in Roswell, Georgia and Athens, Alabama where he became indignant with black Americans. He had trouble holding down previous work and so traveled through Roswell, Georgia; Warren, Rhode Island; Athens, Alabama; Bayport, New York; and Santa Barbara, California. He has the typical attitude of someone suffering from reverse snobbery. He has no education in Political Science and has no basis for his political comments other than yellow journalism and the fact that he works for Rupert Murdock, who has his own political agenda. He is the Hannity Report editor at Fox News, Rupert Murdock's creation to counter all the other news stations that actually report Associated Press stories the way they are written. He also has a radio news show. Hannity hosted his first talk radio show in 1989 at the volunteer college station at UC Santa Barbara, KCSB-FM, while working as a general contractor. The show aired for 40 hours of air time; Hannity has since called the show "terrible." Hannity's weekly show on KCSB was canceled after less than a year by station managers upset with his remarks about gays and lesbians. This was after two shows featuring the book The AIDS Coverup: The Real and Alarming Facts about AIDS by Gene Antonio; among other remarks, Hannity told a lesbian caller "I feel sorry for your child". The station later reversed its decision to dismiss Hannity due in part to a campaign conducted by the Santa Barbara Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Hannity decided against returning to KCSB.After leaving KCSB, Hannity placed an ad in radio publications presenting himself as "the most talked about college radio host in America." Radio station WVNN in Athens, Alabama (part of the Huntsville market) then hired him to be the afternoon talk show host. From Huntsville, he moved to WGST in Atlanta in 1992, filling the slot vacated by Neal Boortz, who had moved to competing station WSB. In September 1996 Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes hired the then relatively unknown Hannity to host a television program under the working title Hannity and LTBD ("liberal to be determined").Alan Colmes was then hired to co-host and the show debuted as Hannity & Colmes.Later that year Hannity left WGST for New York, where WABC had him substitute for their afternoon drive time host during Christmas week. In January 1997, WABC put Hannity on the air full-time, giving him the late night time slot. WABC then moved Hannity to the same drive time slot he had filled temporarily a little more than a year earlier. Hannity has been on WABC's afternoon time slot since January 1998.In 2005, Fortune included Hannity in the article "25 People We Envy Most (Lucky Hall of Fame Getting Paid to Mouth Off)".As the No. 2 radio talk-show host in America, Hannity signed a five-year contract in July 2008 said to be worth "about $100 million."Conservative Cal Thomas and liberal Bob Beckel, in their book Common Ground, describe Hannity as a leader of the pack among broadcasting political polarizers, which following James Q. Wilson they define as those who have "an intense commitment to a candidate, a culture, or an ideology that sets people in one group definitively apart from people in another, rival group."Hannity was a co-host of Hannity & Colmes, an American political "point-counterpoint"-style television program on the Fox News Channel featuring Hannity and Alan Colmes as co-hosts. Hannity presents the conservative point of view with Colmes providing the "faux liberal" viewpoint as weakly as possible in order to give the impression that he actually was liberal and that Fox News was actually fair and balanced. Hannity had on air clashes with show guests such as Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer of Human Life International, who challenged Hannity on his public dissent from the Catholic Church on the issue of contraception. Hannity stated that if the Catholic Church were to excommunicate him over the issue, he would join Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, the church associated with Liberty University, who awarded Hannity his honorary doctoral degree. Hannity has hosted country music-themed Freedom Concerts since 2003, billed to help benefit the Freedom Alliance Scholarship Fund, a charity created by Oliver North to provide college scholarships to children with a parent severely disabled or killed in military action. Appearing artists have included Sara Evans, Martina McBride, Lee Greenwood, LeAnn Rimes, Montgomery Gentry, Darryl Worley, Charlie Daniels, Larry the Cable Guy, and Michael W. Smith. And you can imagine how well a guy from New York actually fits in with and/or even listens to, country music played by people who grew up around and played in Nashville.Hannity's Internet dating service, "Hannidate", matches conservative or Republican-leaning singles, heterosexual and gay. Begun in 2005, it is described as a "place where people of like conservative minds can come together to meet." His site is visited mostly by gay men despite his continued bashing of gays. When reporters asked if he knew about this when he bought the site, he made it clear he has always known it had the gay dating component built in.