Hannity, radical transparency activist
by digby
Well, except for Trump’s tax returns, of course.
For some reason I find this old interview to be hilarious:
Fox News host Sean Hannity reflects on his interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which will air in full tonight. He met Assange at his house arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been imprisoned for more than four years.
“I believe every word he says, to be perfectly honest,” Hannity said about Assange. “Here’s the bottom line. What did he reveal here? Two things that I think come out of this, that if we looked at it from the proper perspective– Look, I was an early critic of him. He is well aware that I thought he was waging war on the United States. My opinion of it has evolved largely because of what I have seen that he has done in ten years. Nothing he has published has ever been proven false. Nobody has questioned the veracity or truthfulness of what he’s doing. Just like the New York Times had information about Donald Trump’s taxes illegally, they still ran with the story… I’m convinced any media outlet that was colluding with the Clinton campaign, they would have run with the story.”
“So the two things the United States ought to take out of WikiLeaks is, number one: As a country, we do not have cybersecurity, and if we don’t fix it, we’ll never have it. The second thing is, I think he exposed, at a level I never expected… What we learned in this election is how deeply corrupt… the level of our politics is, and collusion between media outlets and campaigns. There is not objective journalism in America. And of course, the media doesn’t want to cover that story.”
Surely Hannity will offer to testify on Assange’s behalf, right? Being such a true believer in objective journalism and all.
Truthfully, I think the charges against Assange are dangerous to the First Amendment. There’s a reason the Obama administration didn’t run with them. If Emptywheel is correct, it’s possible they are going to add more charges before the extradition that are less dicey but if not this seems to be a real reach.
That doesn’t mean I have any more respect for what Assange has become in recent years than I do for his soul brothers Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. He’s a member of the political media and one of the worst practitioners now that he’s aligned himself with authoritarian right-wingers like Trump and slants his “journalism” in favor of Trump’s politics. He’s just another rabid partisan wingnut — but that’s a legitimate exercise of the First Amendment.
However, I think the mainstream media needs to take a gut check and ask themselves whether or not they properly contextualized his “work” during 2016 and made proper note of the fact that the vaunted radical transparency organization was playing the same role as Breitbart or Drudge when he openly admitted he was hostile to one side and only releasing information that helped that cause. Instead, they drooled and grunted over every risotto recipe like they’d uncovered a new Rosetta Stone. They were the ones who mainlined all that banal campaign bullshit and enabled the right to treat “her emails” as a federal case, even as they were comically inept at dealing with the rampant criminality and unfitness of Donald Trump.
Assange is entitled under the first amendment to support corrupt, authoritarian scumbags like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin if he chooses. That’s the price we pay for freedom. It’s up to the rest of the press to put what he does in proper perspective.
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