Because he is neither a journalist nor a human with any consistent sense of morality or integrity, Sean Hannity decided yesterday that, actually, alleged pedophile Roy Moore is probably fine. As the clock ticked down on Hannity’s 24-hour ultimatum that Moore disprove the mounting allegations of sexually assaulting underage women, Hannity unleashed a monologue that can only be described as Hannitian in its blend of self-aggrandizement, obfuscation, and far-right kowtowing. That could be described as “not an ultimatum,” after all.
Hannity began by touting his journalistic bona fides, saying that “unlike everyone else in the media” he had gone directly to the source for a quote, which he then spent the entire remainder of his show reading verbatim, because that is what a real journalist would do, too. You can listen to Hannity’s audiobook version of Moore’s statement below, but we can also save you some time: Rather than dispute the allegations themselves, Moore is directing attention toward the message he allegedly wrote in the yearbook of one of the women accusing him of assault. (She was 16 at the time.) Like an animal following a laser pointer, Hannity too focuses on the signature, touting that he had a “forensics expert” on his radio show who would, at some later date, be able to further cast doubt on the veracity of the signature itself. They are focusing on the age of the ink and differences in the penmanship of the number seven.
In other words, he kicked the can down the road, calling at most for a delay of the election such that he, Moore, and the far-right ethno-nationalist establishment supporting them can continue to sow misinformation into the voting populace, in hopes that Moore’s decades of alleged pedophilia can go just unnoticed enough to allow him to be elected to public office. The 24-hour deadline has now been extended to forever, because, as it turns out, it was a transparent show of journalistic integrity in light of the advertisers fleeing from his show. Threat abated, Hannity can quit pretending to be a journalist, abandon the pretext of putting Moore on trial, and get back to his true passion: transparently supporting the far right via active misinformation campaigns. And also making big-ass charts.