The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote that Fox News host Sean Hannity’s refusal to report negative news stories about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump -- including Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech -- should disqualify him from anchoring the network’s coverage of the Republican National Convention.
Hannity has used his Fox News primetime show to defend Trump numerous times including backing him when media have called out Trump’s racist attacks, his delayed contributions to veterans, his unprecedented refusal to release his tax returns, his debunked conspiracy theories, various widely-criticized policy proposals, and for inflaming rhetoric at his campaign rallies. Media have criticized Hannity’s “unapologetic advocacy” for Trump, to which Hannity responded by asserting on his radio show, “I am not a journalist, I’m a talk show host.”
In a July 19 Washington Post article, Wemple wrote that while CNN and MSNBC reported that Melania Trump plagiarized parts of her convention-headlining speech, Hannity instead issued “pom-pom deployment,” “raving about Trump.” Hannity’s refusal to report bad news about Trump, Wemple wrote, makes him “the wrong guy for the anchor chair” during the convention. From Wemple’s article:
About 20 minutes after midnight, MSNBC anchors Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow announced a wee-hours breaking story. “We’ve had a remarkable turn of events,” said Maddow. “This started on social media. People on Twitter first started circulating some eyebrow-raising claims about Melania Trump’s speech this evening. That led us . . . to go dig up the archival material and check these claims, and it does appear that there are some unusual similarities, some unusual, very tight parallels between Melania Trump’s speech tonight and Michelle Obama’s speech in a similar position in the 2008 nominating convention for her husband, Barack Obama.”
Around that time, Fox News’s Sean Hannity was raving about Trump. “First of all, she’s an amazing woman ... smart, charming, kind nice.”
[...]
And so it went for the next half-hour. CNN and MSNBC went into cable-news monofocus, breaking down the issue in all of its particulars: Who wrote the speech? How did this happen? What are the implications?
Fox News viewers might not have known what was happening, because of Hannity. He was busy with non-Trump-speech-purloining material, including a chat with two mothers whose sons were killed by illegal immigrants and a panel on race. Signing off from his program, Hannity proclaimed that it had been a “great first night.” Such pom-pom deployment is what you might expect from Hannity, who is a self-professed Donald Trump supporter. So much so that he once orchestrated a round of applause from a live audience for Donald Trump’s proposal to ban entry by Muslims into the United States. Ever a transportation helper, Hannity flew Newt Gingrich to Indiana to meet with Trump as part of the vice-presidential interview process, according to CNN.
When bad news is breaking on the Trump campaign, in other words, Hannity is the wrong guy for the anchor chair.