HANNITY
HAS SAID TO ME MORE THAN ONCE, ‘HE’S CRAZY’”: FOX NEWS STAFFERS FEEL TRAPPED IN
THE TRUMP CULT
Inside
the network staffers are cringing, and even Trump’s “shadow chief of staff” has
his doubts. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Sean
Hannity told a colleague during Trump’s early days.
AUGUST 20, 2020
Landing an interview with a president used to
be a big deal. Negotiations between a network producer and the White House
press office could drag on for months. No detail was too small to haggle over:
background, time of day, exact number of minutes. Presidential sit-downs were
the pinnacles of many news anchors’ careers.
No more. Just as he has
bulldozed so many political norms, Donald Trump has turned the
presidential TV interview into a joke. Fox News lets him call in for talk
radio-style rant sessions, the length of which are a punch line among
rank-and-file Fox staffers who secretly despise him despite working for his
media machine. “When Trump was booked for 8:10, and we had an assignment for
8:40, we didn’t bother writing it, because we knew he’d talk until the end of
the hour,” a producer for Fox & Friends told me.
He called the “Friends”
and Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity and Maria
Bartiromo. Every so often he’d consent to an on-camera chat, but he liked
the phone. It made him seem busy when he wasn’t. The interviews, if they can
really be called that, were subject to his whims, causing no small amount of
competition among the Trump bootlickers at Fox. Stars were known to slip
ratings reports to the president to make their own shows look more impressive
than those of their in-house rivals. Sometimes interviews were suddenly offered
to hosts when Trump heard them say something flattering on TV. One personality
rushed to the airport for a cross-country flight when a sit-down suddenly materialized.
Other times the bookings were simply a product of who had bent Trump’s ear most
recently: There were side deals brokered during stopovers at his golf club and
pitches made during strategy calls.“Why don’t you call in tomorrow?”
More often than not, he
did just that. Trump needed Fox to a degree that almost no one understood. He
depended on propagandists like Hannity to keep the walls of his alternative
reality intact.
That’s why, on March 26,
2020, the president was scheduled to call into Hannity’s show at 9 p.m. sharp.
Nine o’clock couldn’t come soon enough for Trump—his newly established daily
press briefings on the COVID-19 crisis were proving to be a disaster. That day,
he’d gone before the cameras at 5:30 p.m. and told the public to “relax”; shared his affection for Tom Brady;
and attacked the “corrupt” news media. “I wish the news could be real,” he told
the journalists who were spread out in the briefing room, respecting
social-distancing guidelines. Trump, of course, did no such thing. The country
was two weeks into a shutdown of unprecedented proportions. He complained about
it; mused about filling the church pews on Easter; and stood uncomfortably
close to his coronavirus task force members.
After 39 minutes the
president left the briefing early, ordered dinner, and waited for his turn
on Hannity. The power imbalance was something to behold: He had the
joint chiefs and the cabinet and any number of world leaders at his beck and
call. He could talk to any scientist or public health expert he wanted. But
when it came to a Fox interview, he was just another caller waiting to be
patched into the control room.
Hannity started the show
with his usual sermon about Democrats endangering the country. He ripped into
New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose brother, Chris,
not coincidentally anchored a rival show on CNN in the same time slot, and
Mayor Bill de Blasio. Then, a good 20 minutes into his show, he
finally prepared to welcome his guest.
“Is he there?” Hannity asked his producers. He
heard nothing and momentarily freaked out, waiting for the control room to tell
him what to do.
Then came the voice of
Fox’s very own God: “I am, I’m right here. Hi, Sean.”
“Mr. President!” Hannity
exclaimed. “Thank you…”
And they were off. Trump
began by flattering Hannity, claiming he’d postponed a critical call with
Chinese President Xi Jinping just to get on air. He said, “I
am talking to him at 10:30, right after this call.” He really did keep the
Chinese president waiting, which irked Beijing, a White House source told me.
But the rest of the Hannity interview was a love-in and a lie-fest. Lower-level
staffers could mock the misinformation all they wanted, and they did,
copiously. But they were powerless. The prime-time stars held the power, and
management had no control over prime time.
The day after their
televised chat, the president called Hannity with a question: “How’d we do?”
Hannity knew his real
meaning was, “How did we rate?”
In the midst of a
crippling pandemic, on a day when another 400-plus Americans would die, the
president wanted to know about his ratings.
Sean Hannity was the most
powerful person at Fox in the Trump age. When people asked who was in charge of
the channel, he said, “Me.” And most people at the channel agreed with him.
He worked from home most
days, long before it was required due to the pandemic, thanks to a
state-of-the-art studio in the basement of his $10.5 million mansion, 38 long
miles from Manhattan, in a village on the North Shore of Long Island. There was
only one way in and one way out of his village, and a police station that kept
track of every car that drove by. Billy Joel lived half a mile
down the road. Hannity was close to his favorite fishing spots and the airstrip
where he kept his private jet. He had no trouble affording all this; he banks an
estimated $43 million per year.
Hannity’s Long Island
mansion and his oceanfront Naples, Florida, penthouse were two über-expensive
symbols of how Roger Ailes changed his life. I viewed Hannity as a living
connection to Fox’s past, the only prime-time host who was there on launch day
and is still there nearly 25 years later. But he definitely wasn’t one to dwell
on the past. Every day was a new war.
Hannity played his part
masterfully. But his friends told me he was burnt out for long stretches of the
Trump presidency. Being the president’s “shadow chief of staff,” as he was
known around the White House, could be a thrill, but it was also a serious burden.
Hannity counseled Trump at all hours of the day; one of his confidants said the
president treated Hannity like Melania, a wife in a sexless
marriage. Arguably, he treated Hannity better than Melania.
Hannity’s producers marveled at his influence and access. “It’s a powerful
thing to be someone’s consigliere,” one producer said. “I hear Trump talk at
rallies, and I hear Sean,” a family friend commented.
Hannity chose this life,
so no one felt sorry for him, but the stress took its toll. “Hannity would tell
you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his
associates said. Another friend concurred: “Hannity has said to me more than
once, ‘he’s crazy.’”
But Hannity’s commitment
to GOP priorities and to his own business model meant he could never say any of
this publicly. If one of his friends went on the record quoting Hannity
questioning Trump’s mental fitness, that would be the end of the friendship.
Early on in the Trump age, Hannity gained
weight and vaped incessantly, which some members of his inner circle blamed on
Trump-related stress. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping
too,” Hannity told a colleague. He was sensitive to trolls’ comments about the
extra weight, especially from his chest up; that’s all viewers saw of him most
nights, when he was live from his palace. He doubled up on his workouts and
slimmed back down.
Hannity swore that no one
knew the truth about his relationship with Trump. He lashed out at people, like
yours truly, who reported on it. And he certainly didn’t disclose his role in
Trumpworld the way a media ethicist would recommend. But once in a while the
curtain slipped and his own colleagues pointed out the extraordinary position
he held. As the coronavirus crisis deepened in March, Geraldo Rivera said
to Hannity on the air, “I want you to tell the president, when you talk to him
tonight, that Geraldo says ‘Mr. President, for the good of the nation, stop
shaking hands.’”
Needless to say, that’s
not how Hannity’s calls with Trump actually went. They were instead a stream of
grievance and gossip. Trump was a run-on sentence, so prone to rambling that “I
barely get a word in,” Hannity told one of his allies. He sometimes spoke with
the president before the show and again afterward, usually in the 10 p.m. hour,
when Trump rated his guests and recommended talking points and themes for the
following day. Trump was just like the rest of Hannity’s viewers: He wanted
more of Gregg Jarrett on the show, more of Dan Bongino,
more of Newt Gingrich—the toadiest toads possible.
In the Trump age,
left-wing blogs filled up with stories about families torn apart by a loved
one’s Hannity addiction. I heard those stories from Fox staffers too: Some of
their relatives resented what they did for a living. They made excuses,
mumbling that they were simply giving the people what they wanted. “I feel like
Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer said. “The
audience has been RADICALIZED,” a longtime commentator texted me, in all caps,
as he scrolled through his Twitter feed after a live shot on the daytime
show America’s Newsroom. The amount of vitriol shocked him. Any
break from Trump was penalized. Nuanced debates about the role of government
and taxation and immigration were distilled to a single question: Were you with
Trump or against him?
Hannity deserved a big
share of the blame for this state of affairs. But despite that, and despite the
fact that he was rarely at headquarters, Hannity was well-liked around Fox.
Colleagues described him as a big-hearted family guy. He paid bonuses to his
staff out of his own deep pockets. He ordered meals and care packages to the
homes of colleagues who lost loved ones. He even offered to hire a private
investigator when an acquaintance died in a mysterious crash. When the network
descended on New Hampshire for primary election coverage, Hannity footed the
bill for the open bar. A member of Sean’s production crew, a Democrat, told me,
“I want to fucking hate him so bad. But he’s so nice to me.”
I believed him. But I
struggled to square Hannity’s reputation with the man I saw on TV and
occasionally in person. While deep into the research for this book in December
2019, I ran into Hannity at a holiday party hosted by the TV-news tracking
website Mediaite. We were upstairs at the Lambs Club, a stately Manhattan
restaurant wrapped with red leather banquettes on 44th Street. Hannity greeted
me by putting both his hands on my shoulders and exclaiming: “Humpty!” His
nickname for me was Humpty Dumpty. I asked if he ever felt bad about the
name-calling. “No,” he said. He took his hands off my shoulders and moved
toward the bar.
It was eight o’clock, and Hannity worked the
room like a pro, dressed down in a Fox-branded hoodie. He hugged CNN’s Alisyn
Camerota and chatted with media reporters and even said hi to Trump
antagonist George Conway. This room was the embodiment of the
so-called “media mob” he attacked every weeknight—and he looked like he didn’t
want to leave it. I wondered what Hannity’s viewers would think. At 8:30 his
P.R. person pushed him toward the door, insisting he had to get to the studio
for his nine o’clock show. I later realized that the P.R. person had lied—he
had pretaped his show before coming to the party.
Those were the pre-social
distancing days, when Hannity could still fraternize with the enemy. Months
later, Hannity dismissed coronavirus “hysteria” and bashed Democrats
who raised alarms about the virus. In the words of one Kansas City resident’s
FCC complaint, Hannity “has misled his elderly viewers on the risk of pandemic
virus. They are most at risk.” Hannity, of course, insisted that he always took
the virus seriously. But the transcripts proved otherwise.
There are dozens of
reasons why the United States lagged so far behind in preparations for the
pandemic. Some are cultural, some are economic, some are political. But there
is no doubt that one of the reasons is the Trump–Fox feedback loop. When the
virus silently spread, some of Fox’s biggest stars denied and downplayed the
threat.
Trump echoed them, and
they echoed back. “The thing that’s going to end this is the warmer
weather,” Greg Gutfeld said on February 24. “One day—it’s like
a miracle—it will disappear,” Trump said on February 27. Fox’s longest-tenured
medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, told Hannity on March 6, “at
worst, at worst, worst case scenario, it could be the flu.”
This was shockingly
irresponsible stuff—and Fox executives knew it, because by the beginning of
March, they were taking precautions that belied Siegel’s claim, canceling an event for
hundreds of advertisers, instituting deep cleanings of the office, and
putting a work-from-home plan in place. Fox’s most vociferous critics said the
network had blood on its hands. An advocacy group in Washington State compiled
this information and filed suit against Fox. (That lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.) Some Fox staffers
privately admitted that the don’t-worry tone of the talking heads was harmful.
“Hazardous to our viewers,” “dangerous,” and “unforgivable” are some of the
phrases Fox News staffers used to describe the network’s early coverage of the
coronavirus pandemic.
The contrast between
Fox’s public face and the private “resistance” has existed ever since Trump
upended the presidential race five years ago. It’s the reason why I decided to
write a book about the network and its unprecedented alliance with the White
House. In all I spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, plus 180 former
staffers and others with direct ties to the network. Their frustration was
palpable. Staffers described a TV network that had gone off the rails. Some
even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks from, had
become dangerous to democracy. They felt like the news division had been
squeezed out in favor of pro-Trump blowhards.
Most of the insiders
acknowledged that Fox News was always, on one level, a political project, but
many said they were shocked by how thoroughly Fox and the GOP had been merged
by Trump, Hannity, and a handful of other power players.
“We surrendered,” one
anchor said with remorse in his voice. “We just surrendered.”
“What does Trump have on
Fox?” another anchor asked, convinced there was a conspiracy at play.
A lot of people I spoke to were desperate to
talk. Others were terrified. Ailes made everyone paranoid and punished those he
suspected of leaking. That same fear of retribution was still very real in the
post-Ailes years. Employees suspected their work phones were tapped and assumed
their emails were monitored by management. I cannot overstate the level of
paranoia among Fox employees.
Most of the sources only
spoke on condition of anonymity, citing Fox’s nondisclosure agreements and
other rules against speaking with outside members of the media. This was
especially true for on-air talent. I laughed several times when I heard Fox
stars bemoaning the use of anonymous sources on air, knowing those very same
people were confidential sources. After all, that’s how this business
works.
Copyright
© 2020 by Brian Stelter. From the forthcoming book HOAX: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of
Truth by Brian Stelter to be published by One Signal
Publishers/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by
permission.