Don’t expect to see Sean Hannity buying Ted Koppel a shot of tequila at the bar anytime soon. The Fox News personality might have a love affair for Dave Chappelle, but his interview with Koppel on CBS Sunday Morning has left him fuming and venting on his own show. Instead of accepting Koppel’s criticism and just moving on with his typical showcase, Hannity decides to dig in and call the former Nightline host biased before attacking CBS by using one of Donald Trump’s favorite terms with a twist.
For Hannity, he can’t believe that CBS would cut down his 45-minute interview with Koppel and leave it as the “gotcha’ moment we got to see on the air this Sunday. Koppel agreeing that Hannity and his contemporaries are “bad for America” was just an example of “edited fake news” and not a common practice that almost every news organization employs to broadcast interviews. He then proceeds to bring up as much negative information about CBS News as he can muster, including Dan Rather’s controversial exit from the neighborhood, the network’s treatment of Sharyl Attkisson, and their reporting on issues related to Obama and his “bad company” like Bill Ayers. As Death And Taxes points out, most of this is wrong or irrelevant to the interview on Sunday.
That doesn’t stop Hannity from using it to call Koppel biased — something he’s apparently used to from his time on Nightline, but typically coming from the other side — and asking why he didn’t call out CBS as “bad for America” with incidents like Rather’s report on George W. Bush that led to his exit from the network. The problem here is that Koppel has only been with CBS for about a year as a special CBS Sunday Morning correspondent, spending most of his career at ABC. Also, Koppel did call out CBS over the Rather incident in an interview with Frontline. It just doesn’t fit Hannity’s narrative:
I think CBS treated [Dan Rather] shabbily. In journalism, as in politics, you’ve got to get it all right. If you’re 99 percent right and you make one mistake, all anyone is going to remember is the mistake. Dan’s team made a mistake. Was the whole story wrong? No, I don’t think so. I think they had the story pretty much nailed. But they got one particular part of that story wrong, and that was enough to hang all of them out to dry. We can all get nailed that way.
The entire segment just seems like an exercise in Hannity once again using his own show as a soapbox and outlet to undermine any criticism. It is a safe space for him and he’s with his own audience, not trying to dodge questions from a semi-retired journalist. It’s just odd that he’s out to call things “fake news” and call journalists biased when he’s employed by Fox News. Their recent track record isn’t exactly spot free.
(Via Fox News / Death And Taxes)