Sean Hannity is stuck in a ratings slump and has spent the past week or so promoting unverifiable claims made by hustlers and phonies about the unsolved July 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Police believe Rich may have been killed during an attempted robbery; Hannity believes that the 27-year-old was targeted for death by Hillary Clinton and George Soros because he was passing DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Law enforcement authorities and Rich’s family say there is no evidence of any of this, and the Rich family has implored Hannity to stop defaming and speculating about their late son, but the host is insisting he will continue to pursue the nonstory because he believes (in a giant and fallacious logical leap) that it would prove there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
While Hannity’s show has never been the domain of responsible, reasoned analysis, the uniquely foul specter of a TV blowhard gratuitously prolonging the suffering of a dead young man’s parents—and perhaps the general atmosphere of failure and sexual degeneracy pervading Fox News as a whole at the moment—have convinced a number of advertisers to announce that they’ll no longer run ads on Hannity’s show:
- Cars.com
- Casper
- Crowne Plaza
- Leesa Sleep
- Peloton
- Ring.com
- USAA
The well-connected Democratic activist organization Media Matters is among the groups pressuring remaining advertisers to drop the host. Hannity will not be appearing on air Thursday or Friday night, but he and the network both say he’s merely taking a Memorial Day vacation that has nothing to do with recent controversies. We’ll see!
