Fox News host Sean Hannity’s role as an off-the-books political operative to former President Donald Trump extended to writing copy for one of the Trump campaign’s commercials, according to a new report.
Mike Bender, the Wall Street Journal’s senior White House reporter, reports that Hannity played a role in scripting a Trump campaign ad in his forthcoming book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story Of How Trump Lost. According to a write-up in PunchBowl News, “The ad was known in the Trump campaign as ‘the Hannity ad’ and ‘the one Hannity wrote,’” and Bender describes internal Trump campaign emails which “referred to the spot simply as ‘Hannity’” or “the ‘Hannity-written’ spot.”
The ad, like Hannity’s show during the campaign, is a semi-coherent mashup of pro-Trump and anti-Biden talking points that lacks a clear narrative.
And indeed, according to Bender, the ad was widely mocked within the Trump campaign and aired only once, on Hannity’s program, at a cost of $1.5 million.
Hannity vaguely denied writing the ad copy, telling Bender, “The world knows that Sean Hannity supports Donald Trump. But my involvement specifically in the campaign -- no. I was not involved that much. Anybody who said that is full of shit.”
It’s hard to know what to think about a statement like this from a notorious liar. But one reasonable interpretation is that this helps to establish an outer bound for the type of political behavior Hannity thinks his employer would let him get away with. The statement suggests that he believes that Fox would have a problem with him openly accepting responsibility for writing one of the former president’s campaign ads.
This is, of course, an absurdly low bar for a cable news host. But as I noted last year, Hannity regularly violated basic tenets of journalistic ethics throughout the Trump years, with the network brass either ignoring his behavior or offering slaps on the wrist: