What will Sean Hannity do now?

12/17/08 - Here we go again. My Internet connection is down tonight (though I hope to have it back in a day or two) so I’m writing this off-line to be posted as soon as I can. Tomorrow, hopefully; I’ll make a call or two and try to get it sorted out. In any case, here’s a not-to-timely article that I hope will stay a little relevant until I can post it. Enjoy. -BV

Fox News has informed the world that Alan Colmes, the liberal partner of conservative host Sean Hannity on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, has announced his retirement at the end of this year. Would it be overly rude of me to point out that the world has scarcely noticed? Yes, it probably would.

For years Colmes has provided a limited amount of counterpoint to Hannity’s blatant conservative patter (I say "limited" as he seldom seems to get a word in edgewise; seems, but he actually manages to get in little better than half the verbiage of Hannity, according to Al Frankin’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) and has, not surprisingly, been largely ignored by even the most loyal viewers of Hannity and Colmes.

But then, how could it be otherwise? Colmes was carefully picked for that job; Fox could not have found a less sympathetic looking liberal if they had advertised the post saying "Wanted: One liberal milquetoast, no strong chins allowed, must be willing to defer to conservative demagogue in all matters." I mean, have you ever seen the guy? He looks like a caricature of a liberal pantywaist as drawn by Rush Limbaugh.

OK, so I’m not being fair to Alan Colmes. In truth, I really believe that he has always tried to present a point of view counter to Hannity’s right-wing drivel (you may take that as an editorial comment), or at least as far as he was allowed; there has always appeared (to me, anyway) to be a very real effort on the part of both Fox and Sean Hannity to limit Alan Colmes’ screen-time. Fox is, after all, a staunchly conservative channel and their "news" coverage has always appeared to me to be so strongly right-slanted that their cameras have to be mounted sideways to make their "news" look straight. Under difficult circumstances, Alan Colmes has done as good a job as he was allowed to do, to keep the show what it was always billed as; a news commentary and interview program showcasing opposing viewpoints. It’s hardly his fault that the deck was well and truly stacked against him.

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not a big fan of Fox News. And I’m not a fan of the Hannity and Colmes show, either; I doubt I’ve seen more than eight or ten shows in all. So I’m basing my opinion on this admittedly limited experience of the program. However, the shows I’ve seen are so uniformly one-sided that I cannot believe that I’ve seen the only eight or ten shows that show Alan Colmes in a poor light. I think it’s far more likely that these shows are typical.

Unfortunately, whatever they may have told Alan Colmes it always seemed to me that he was there mostly to make Sean Hannity look good. This he did extraordinarily well; I don’t think Sean Hannity, on his own, would have become the right-wing icon he is today without Alan Colmes as a foil. Given that, maybe it would be better if Alan Colmes hadn’t been around, after all.

All of which begs the question, what will Sean Hannity do now? Which itself begs the question, do I care?

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.