SCHADENFREUDE: Being a Myopic Dick About the Election Cost Sean Hannity Half His Audience

[Purveyor]

Oh, Sean "Don't Worry, Frightened Elderlies, We'd Never Reelect a Colored!" Hannity. It pleases me to laugh at you! All the bizarre, insulated right-wing media rhetoric—which straight-facedly predicted a landslide win for Romney—is coming back to bite them where it hurts a conservative the most. In the dick money.

According to Nielsen numbers, Hannity lost around half of his audience in the weeks after the election, while his Fox News colleague Bill O'Reilly - who steadfastly refuses to identify himself politically as a conservative - retained around 70% of his audience.

So what happened to Hannity?

The going wisdom is that viewers who basked in his preelection anti-Obama rhetoric tuned him out when they were stunned to wake up on Nov. 7 and discover that the President had won a second term - a scenario that Hannity had all but promised could never happen.

...Wrote Friedersdorf: "The right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear."

By contrast, Rachel Maddow lost very little of her audience and Anderson Cooper "almost none," which is especially significant because "until the election, Hannity was unassailable by any of his rivals, at least in terms of ratings." I don't really give a shit if Hannity stays on the air or loses his show or has to do Grover Norquist's laundry for a year or whatever. If he gets canceled some other disingenuous party-line hack will just take his place. No big. But it is satisfying and heartening to see that once in a while lies have consequences—even if it's just grumpy old dinos killing the messenger because the news didn't go their way.

MORE...

http://jezebel.com/5972346/being-a-myopic-dick-about-the-election-lost-sean-hannity-half-his-audience

[Faygo Kid]

1. He is and always has been a complete and utter fraud.

An uneducated bigot, like his peers Rush and Beck, he knows how to make money: Repeat his rubes' talking points over and over again. And then cash in his millions.

[HillWilliam]

2. Sean, Sean, Sean

Howzat wishcraft workin' out for ya?

[RebelOne]

3. I would love to see Hannity off the radio air

and off the TV tubes. That man is a joke. He even believes his own lies.

[KharmaTrain]

4. In Due Time...

Hate radio is becoming a liability to its corporate owners. The fallout from rushbo's tirades last year and the subsequent PR fallout cost not only rushbo but all talk radio lots of sponsors. Sean was one of the worst in spreading lies not only to those of us who are used to hearing them, but more specifically to a loyal audience that felt betrayed. He screwed his own pooch and if he can't deliver the numbers there's little patience within a corporate radio world that is drowning in debts. The unfortunate byproduct is its also taking a toll on Progressive talk where we've seen a handful of long time Progressive talkers pull the plug within the past month. The entire genre is dying...

[Demo_Chris]

5. Hannity is a piece of ****