During Thursday night’s Hannity on the Fox News Channel, Sean Hannity tore into the leftist media’s hyped coverage of the latest anti-Trump story which inevitably turned out to be another hoax, while also tearing into the media’s refusal to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election. As an added bonus, he mocked CNN’s Brian Stelter for his complete dodge to a freshman college student’s question about CNN’s bias.
“During the 2020 election, the media mob, they refused to report on any of this damming material,” Hannity observed, referring to the glaring evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop during the election that the media purposefully ignored to help get Joe Biden elected. He added that the media “called the laptop Russian disinformation.”
Hannity shrewdly pointed out “now that the election is safely in the rearview mirror the laptop, oh all of a sudden is now being validated by multiple outlets.” This caused him to surmise that “they're not sorry about it”, they won’t apologize and will “just move on to the next lie.”
“Remember the recent hysteria over the Trump phone logs?” Hannity noted as he displayed a screenshot of a NewsBusters tweet calling out the media’s lies: “it all turned out to be false.” He then aired a montage of various leftist media hosts all parroting the same lies about the fake Trump phone log story:
STEPHANIE RUHLE: Tonight seven hours and thirty-seven minutes missing logs given to the January 6 committee show that gap in the former president's phone records. Was there a burner phone?
JOHN AVLON: Seven hours? Makes the eighteen minutes of erased oval office tapes around Watergate look like a game of pattycake.
ERIN BURNETT: Not a single call between 11:17 a.m. and 6:54 p.m. That of course is the entire window of the insurrection.
CHRIS HAYES: Seems we need to know who Donald Trump spoke to over that missing seven hours and thirty-seven minutes and crucially what they talked about and why he wanted to hide it.
BOB WOODWARD: This astonishing seven-hour and thirty-seven-minute gap you and I go back to the 1970s and Watergate. It was only an eighteen and a half minute gap.
Later on in the segment, Hannity played a video of Daniel Schmidt of Chicago university's conservative/libertarian newspaper The Chicago Thinker taking Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum to task over her dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Then Hannity slammed CNN’s Brian Stelter who he calls “Humpty Dumpty” for completely ignoring another student’s question from the same college paper:
“That student was a thousand percent right on every issue fake news CNN got wrong. And little Humpty Dumpty, he sat on a wall and had a great fall and couldn't answer the question” Hannity exclaimed.
Adding that we should “Never forget the Russian collusion was three years of conspiracy theories and lies and a hoax.”
Hannity ended the segment with one more shot at Stelter: “that's not a right-wing narrative. Humpty, that's called facts, something you don't know anything about.”
To read the relevant transcript of the Hannity segment click "expand":
FNC’s Hannity
4/7/2022
9:04:45 p.m. EasternSEAN HANNITY: During the 2020 election, the media mob, they refused to report on any of this damming material. In fact, they called the laptop Russian disinformation. Remember this laptop came out two weeks before the election and, remember big tech, Twitter, Facebook, they absolutely banned anybody from even sharing the information to decide for themselves. You may remember.
(...)
HANNITY: Alright, now that the election is safely in the rearview mirror the laptop, oh all of a sudden is now being validated by multiple outlets. Why did that happen at this time? Could it be they knew the grand jury was asking really important serious significant questions and that they would be exposed as the frauds they are? I don't know. Call me cynical. Don't expect them to correct the record in any way. Don't expect an apology. That likely won't happen. Has anyone corrected the record on all their Russian collusion lies? Have they corrected the record about all the slander against Donald Trump and his family? Now, they know they buried this scandal. They know they wanted to help get Joe Biden elected. And they're not sorry about it and they're not gonna act sorry about it. They’ll just move on to the next lie. For example, remember the recent hysteria over the Trump phone logs? Remember that? It all turned out to be false. Take a look.
[cuts to video]
STEPHANIE RUHLE: Tonight seven hours and thirty-seven minutes missing logs given to the January 6 committee show that gap in the former president's phone records. Was there a burner phone?
JOHN AVLON: Seven hours? Makes the eighteen minutes of erased oval office tapes around Watergate look like a game of patty cake.
ERIN BURNETT: Not a single call between 11:17 a.m. and 6:54 p.m. That of course is the entire window of the insurrection.
CHRIS HAYES: Seems we need to know who Donald Trump spoke to over that missing seven hours and thirty-seven minutes and crucially what they talked about and why he wanted to hide it.
BOB WOODWARD: This astonishing seven-hour and thirty-seven-minute gap you and I go back to the 1970s and Watergate. It was only an eighteen and a half minute gap.
[cuts back to live]
HANNITY: They're so excited, they're giddy with excitement. We got him! It’s just like Watergate! That’s it we finally got him! The story was totally bogus. None of that rampant speculation on these fake news networks turned out to be true. But yet again, none of these media hacks ever apologize or correct the record. They just move on to the next group of lies. This is why I have been saying since 2007, right here on this program, journalism in America is dead, done, gone, and buried.
(...)
HANNITY: Listen to one Atlantic reporter at a very ironic disinformation conference on Wednesday. Listen to this.
[cuts to video]
DANIEL SCHMIDT: Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation? What can be learned from that and ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation and not reality?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think totally irrelevant. I meant it’s not whether it's disinformation or I mean I don’t think the–Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be President of the United States. So, I didn’t,--I don’t find it to be interesting. I mean that would be my problem with that as a major news story.
[cuts back to live]
HANNITY: Now this might be my favorite. Not to be outdone, make-believe journalist full-time Fox and Hannity stalker, Humpty Dumpty referred to valid criticism of fake news CNN as a vast right-wing conspiracy. Notice that he never will answer the question that this student is rightly asking about how abusively corrupt and abusively biased fake news CNN is. Take a look.
[cuts to video]
CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS: They pushed the Russian collusion hoax, they pushed the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smeared Justice Kavanaugh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandmann as a white supremacist, and yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop affair as pure Russian disinformation.
With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?
All of the mistakes of the mainstream media, and CNN in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction. Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence or is there something else behind it?
BRIAN STELTER: Too bad, it’s time for lunch.
JIM RUTENBERG: You have 30 seconds, Brian.
STELTER: There’s a clock that says 30 seconds. But I think my honest answer to you – and I’ll come over and talk in more detail after this – is that I think you’re describing a different channel than the one that I watch. But I understand that is a popular right-wing narrative about CNN.
[cuts back to live]
HANNITY: That student was a thousand percent right on every issue fake news CNN got wrong. And little Humpty Dumpty, he sat on a wall and had a great fall and couldn't answer the question. Never forget the Russian collusion was three years of conspiracy theories and lies and a hoax. What he said about Justice Kavanaugh was true and he wasn't a rapist. Fake news CNN ended up paying high school student Nicholas Sandman a ton of money after they viciously smeared him on their network. That's not a right-wing narrative. Humpty, that's called facts, something you don't know anything about.
