Angelo Carusone: Advertisers see “aligning their brand with Hannity as actually the functional equivalent of giving a political donation to Trump”
Media Matters President Angelo Carusone explains why Sean Hannity is toxic for advertisers
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the January 4 edition of SiriusXM The Dean Obeidallah Show:
DEAN OBEIDALLAH (HOST): You are an expert on Sean Hannity so maybe you can give some insight on do you think it’s true. There was a part of the book, it’s actually in “The Hollywood Reporter” article today that Michael Wolff wrote but it’s an excerpt from the book and it said that they wanted to give a big interview, Trump wanted to give a big interview and it said, I’m reading, “The interview went to Fox News’ Sean Hannity who White House insiders happily explained was willing to supply the questions beforehand.” What do you think? And Sean Hannity of course has denied this. What do you think?
ANGELO CARUSONE: I would not be the least bit surprised by this. Nobody has interviewed Donald Trump more than Sean Hannity has and even if it’s not the written questions, if it’s the idea that he’s just going to give him a little bit of a heads up about it of what the big bucket of things that he’s going to talk about it, it just wouldn’t surprise me. They speak regularly. And here’s the other thing that doesn’t surprise me and Sean Spicer confirmed this much at least that back in April when they were worried about, late March, or back in late March, early April when they were starting to think about the potential for the Comey stuff to blow up they were beginning to strategize alternative stories that they could promote that would serve as both a distraction and to deflect from the attention and it’s not a coincidence that the same time that the Comey letters dropped was when Sean Hannity started pushing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.
[…]
Let’s not forget that Sean Hannity is continuing to lose advertisers all the time, every day and the thing that I would point out there is when I talk to them as much as they are concerned about distancing their brands from his extremism or some of the nasty stuff he has said, one of the other factors that’s in play is that the tighter his relationship with Donald Trump and the more people see that in terms of the corporate decision maker side they actual begin to see supporting Hannity or aligning their brand with Hannity as actually the functional equivalent of giving a political donation to Trump.
Previously:
Hannity denies that he gave Trump questions in advance. Here are the questions he asked.