ATLANTA – When the Fox News host Sean Hannity arrived at Centennial Olympic Park last Thursday night, some of the hundreds of fans who had been waiting for him since sunset rushed to the rope line for handshakes and autographs. He obliged, then bounded onto a temporary stage two blocks from the CNN Center and asked them mischievously, “Do you think it’s any coincidence that the CNN logo is in the background?”
Knowing the crowd would get a kick out of it, one of Hannity’s guests, the Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich, chimed in. “That’s gonna get them their biggest rating of the night.”
Hannity had come to Atlanta not to stick it to CNN – though that proved to be fun, too – but to take note of a remarkable anniversary in the city where he was plucked by Roger Ailes out of relative obscurity 15 years ago, when the Fox News Channel was born.
Few thought Fox could unseat CNN, then the country’s dominant cable news channel, but it did, upending the television news business in the United States and providing conservative politicos with a powerful megaphone.
Now Fox is the envy of the media industry for its popularity, and perhaps too for its consistency – something that Hannity embodies, as the only host on the channel to have the same time slot, 9pm, for all of the 15 years.
Fox’s popularity – it’s the No 4 cable channel in prime time this year – has allowed it to gradually raise its advertising prices and its carriage fees and become one of News Corp’s biggest profit centres. The company will soon be going back to distributors to renew its carriage deals, likely for far more than the roughly $1 per subscriber that the channel gets now. Fox had suggested it should be in the same league as ESPN, which gets about $4 per subscriber. Distributors know some subscribers feel they can’t live without hosts like Hannity and his all-important lead-in, Bill O’Reilly.
Hannity (49) is a self-described Reagan conservative who has taken to heart the former president’s famous speech about displaying “bold colours” instead of “pale pastels”. He rarely if ever wavers from his views and campaigns relentlessly against President Barack Obama.
“With all of the most successful cable news shows, you know what you are getting every night – they have a clear identity and mission,” said Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC and a former 9pm host there. “There is probably no host on cable whose identity and mission is clearer than Sean Hannity’s.”
Viewers have rewarded that clarity. “Hannity” had an average of 2.1 million viewers in the first nine months of the year, 528,000 of whom were in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet – a subgroup that numbered as many as CNN and MSNBC had put together.
“Our viewers are loyal to us, and we’re loyal to them,” said John Finley, Hannity’s executive producer, who is a symbol of behind-the-scenes stability, having worked on the show for 12 years. The open-to-the-public show in Atlanta, he said, was a way to thank viewers, part of Fox’s 15th anniversary tour.
At a staff party last month Ailes, the channel’s chief executive and chairman, pointed out that its prime time line-up had changed just “a few times” in 15 years while the other cable news channels “have collectively changed it 63 times”.
Like Hannity, O’Reilly is a Fox original, having started as the 6pm host and having stayed put at 8pm since 1998. The third prime-time host Greta Van Susteren has had the 10pm spot since 2002.
Ailes and Hannity share many of the same conservative core values, like a belief in American exceptionalism and an aggressive counterterrorism stance. Both have written off Obama as a socialist. Warming up his crowd on Thursday, Hannity asked: “How many of you are voting for Barack Obama? Anybody?” When one man said Yes, Hannity tried to toss him a football, an on-camera trademark.
“This is more than Barack Obama’s given you,” Hannity exclaimed. Later, during the 9pm broadcast, the radio host Neal Boortz called Obama “a bigger disaster to this country than 9/11”, prompting condemnations by liberal critics the next day. (There is one liberal guest each evening, sometimes more, though always outnumbered by conservatives.)
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric he instigates, Hannity is good-natured and humble in person, as interested in his children’s tennis matches as in Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. He rarely agrees to interviews, and when he did last week, he said he doesn’t read negative stories about himself, or even the friendly Twitter account all about his abundant head of hair. (A Fox hairdresser keeps tabs on the hair account for him.) The son of a second World War veteran, Hannity delivered newspapers as a boy on Long Island, stirred controversy as a college radio broadcaster and then made his way to Atlanta radio in the early 1990s. He had been a guest on television, but not a host, when Ailes brought him to New York. “He saw something that I didn’t even think I knew I had,” Hannity recalled in an interview. “And he gave me the room to grow.”
The resulting show started on the same day as the Fox News Channel, October 7th, 1996, as Hannity & Colmes,with the mild-mannered liberal Alan Colmes cast as Hannity's sparring partner. The debate fest started routinely beating CNN's Larry King Livein the months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, mirroring the rest of Fox's ratings gains. At about the same time, Hannity started a nationally syndicated radio show, capitalising on his Fox fame. It is now No 2 on radio, behind only Rush Limbaugh.
Hannity said he thought his “principled consistency” appealed to both listeners and viewers. In the park on Thursday night, Finley put it another way. “He has a good barometer for what the audience wants and what they expect,” he said.
After Obama’s election, Colmes left the 9pm hour on Fox and it became Hannity’s alone, visibly moving the prime time line-up further to the right. Hannity acknowledged that Obama might be perceived as good for his business, but quickly said, “what’s good for the country is more important than what’s good for Sean Hannity”.
Hannity's hour has become something of a safe harbour for Republican challengers; one fan in the crowd Thursday, Aaron Johns, said he sensed that "when they're on Hannity, they're more open" because "they're not going to get tricked". Still, Hannity recounted having to call Rick Perry "at least seven or eight times" to book him last month.
“You’re killing me,” he said he told Perry. “The audience wants to see you. You gotta come on.” After the show Hannity told fans that he has no favourite in the Republican field, but that each would be better than Obama.
His contract runs through the next election. “I serve at the pleasure of the president of the company,” he said, referring to Ailes, whose contract runs to 2013. “If he leaves, I might leave.”
Replacing the three hosts will someday weigh heavily on the minds of Fox executives, though Bill Shine, an executive vice-president, said it is not a current concern. In an interview, he contrasted his team with his competitors: “their biggest failing,” he said, “is that they haven’t been able to find good talent”. – (New York Times)