Before the election the situation at Fox News was like so.
- Right-wing power broker and network founder Roger Ailes had been forced out by a deluge of (credible) sexual harassment complaints.
- Megyn Kelly, who is sort of moderate (but only if you ignore what she says about race), was a rising star in part due to her high-profile feud with Donald Trump.
- Sean Hannity was 100 percent completely in Trump’s corner—basically a spokesman for the campaign.
- Rupert Murdoch’s sons, who are assumed to be less politically right-wing than he is, were assumed to be exerting an increasing amount of control on the network (because Rupert is getting hella old).
- Trump, who was trailing in the polls, was being advised by far-right Breitbart media guru Steve Bannon.
This all added up to a general assumption that after Trump lost the election, he’d start his own even-further-right-than-Fox TV network with Bannon, using Hannity as his main star. Kelly would thus become the big name at a less-overtly-Republican Fox. Of course, Donald Trump won the election, somehow, and Megyn Kelly left Fox this week for NBC. With Bill O’Reilly assumed to be retiring sometime soon, this makes Hannity Fox’s alpha Irishman—a high-rated star who has a close relationship with the president-elect.
Friday, Hannity put this dominant position to use in a very high-profile way by mocking MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough publicly for (allegedly) begging behind the scenes for a Fox job. The context is that Scarborough said this morning that Hannity’s softball interviews with Julian Assange were “repulsive”:
Sean Hannity is the big man on campus now at America’s most popular cable news network, and he is going to use that position to be Donald Trump’s chief enforcer. And Joe Scarborough is (almost certainly) not going to get that job he (allegedly) wants at Fox News.
