Sean Hannity now on top of cable t.v. ratings

Matthew Shaer writes for New York Times Magazine a long piece on Sean Hannity, who has risen to the top of cable televison ratings. Here are just a couple of excerpts.

…Bill Shine told me that when it came to the opinion side of the Fox News operation, Hannity was “early on, pretty [much] first” when it came to vocal support of Trump. This put the host at odds with a sizable portion of the Fox News brass, along with Rupert Murdoch, who, according to Murdoch’s biographer, Michael Wolff, had advised Ailes to “tilt to anyone but Trump,” even if that anyone was Hillary Clinton. The vehemently anti-Clinton Hannity was not about to let that happen. (Ailes, after leaving Fox News, later joined the Trump campaign as a debate adviser.)

…In November, Alvin Chang, a writer for Vox, crunched data from two years of Hannity TV transcripts and concluded that Hannity was, in his mentions of topics like “the deep state” and the uranium deal, the media’s “top conspiracy theorist.” In our conversations, Hannity rejected the label, calling it a “typical left-wing attack. My whole career I’ve pursued the truth and have been proven right time after time while my colleagues are often dead wrong.” And to watch Hannity regularly is to observe how distant the host is from a figure like the Infowars proprietor Alex Jones. Jones endorses theories; Hannity almost never does, leaving that job to his guests. It is a dance that has the effect of nourishing the more wild-eyed beliefs of his fans while providing Hannity a degree of plausible deniability.

Sean as a toddler
Read more here.