Hannity’s viewership has declined by 50 percent post-election

Randy writes:

I sure was glad to hear about Hannity’s collapse in the ratings. It was probably his idiotic comment in favor of “comprehensive immigration reform” shortly after the election. Another useless surrender monkey who plays footsie with the leftists such as Colmes and Beckel that he constantly features as guests on his program.

LA replies:

When Hannity declared immediately after the election that Republicans should support amnesty I said I would never watch him again (not that I watch him that often—I do not have cable TV in my home) and that I hoped other conservatives would reject him as well. So I would like to think that Randy’s guess as to the reason for Hannity’s severe ratings decline is correct. However, the article Randy links, at nationalmemo.com, says nothing about Hannity’s surrender on the legalization of illegals. Instead, it speculates that he turned off his viewers by confidently predicting Romney would win:

There’s no way of telling exactly why viewers are fleeing Hannity’s show, but the most likely explanation for his ratings plunge is his outrageously inaccurate analysis of the 2012 presidential election. Many conservative pundits wrongly predicted that Mitt Romney would win the election, but few were as vehement as Hannity, whose show seemed to take place in an alternate right-wing reality.

Hannity’s more reality-based competitors in the 9 pm timeslot have not suffered the same ratings decline. According to the Daily News, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has hung on to most of her audience, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper has lost “almost none” of his viewers post-election. Making matters worse for Hannity, in December Maddow has been beating him in the ratings among the crucial 25-54 demographic. It was on Hannity’s show, for example, that Dick Morris infamously declared that Romney would win the popular vote by 4 or 5 percent, winning Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, and Pennsylvania on the way to a landslide; Morris later admitted that he was consciously lying to Hannity’s viewers in a failed effort to help Romney’s campaign. [LA replies: Is that true?] Hannity also frequently hosted Karl Rove, Peggy Noonan, and Ann Coulter, among other commentators who confidently declared that President Obama’s campaign was dead in the water.

See what I said early on election day about conservative columnists who predicted as an absolute fact that Obama would lose.

However, I’m not sure that Coulter was among the predictors of a Romney victory. In her last column published before the election, she strongly urged that Romney be elected to prevent the catastrophe of Obamacare, but seemed far from assured about the outcome. Also, Noonan did not say that Obama’s campaign was dead in the water. To the contrary, she wrote a noted column during the campaign in which she declared that Romney’s campaign was virtually dead in the water and needed to change radically if it was to have a chance to win. Also, Dick Morris did not admit he consciously lied in order to boost Romney; he said that he had believed his own projections at the time he made them.

Conclusion: nationalmemo.com is not a reliable source of political information.

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Ed H. writes:

The mass desertion of viewers from the Hannity show has less to do with one single issue such as Hannity’s mistaken predictions, and more to do with the sense that the country has entered an entirely new phase of existence. There has been an complete disconnect between the permitted political dialogue and what it would take to give expression to the rage and despair that a very large portion of the population is feeling. These are the conditions for revolution. What can Hannity or Conservative Inc. say now? “Just wait till 2016, folks, the GOP will have a stellar lineup!”? In fact what can anyone actually say or promise that will mean anything at this point? Even more ominous is that the political establishment doesn’t seem to be aware that any of this is happening. Liberal professors get full page press in the country’s preeminent newspaper demanding that the Constitution be scrapped, the left blithely crosses the tripwire issue of gun control and seems unaware, and the voice of the GOP opposition is … who? Boehner? No, what is propelling the cultural and political life of the country is entirely submerged and inarticulate No, what is propelling the cultural and political life of the country is entirely submerged and inarticulate, and it will proceed now, in almost automatic fashion, to catastrophe.

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

Karl D. writes:

I tend to believe that his instant “evolution” towards amnesty after the election has a lot to do with it. It just reeked of cowardice and showed him to be the GOP boot licker that he is. I am sure Rush Limbaugh’s ratings are very much the same as they were pre-election. From what I remember Rush flirted with the ‘Romney is a sure thing’ thing many times as well.

Dan R. writes:

I’m going to throw in my vote on the side of his new amnesty stand being the significant factor in the ratings drop. I have spent more time listening to Hannity than I could justify (the best I can say is that driving home from work he’s still preferable to NPR), and he always staked a large part of his political persona on the illegal immigration issue, basically describing it as a no-brainer. His hasty retreat in the face of an electoral defeat clearly confirms him as the GOP apologist others have mentioned.

Prior to this my biggest complaint about Hannity was his unwillingness or inability to talk about immigration without attaching the word “illegal” to it. Perhaps most significantly, however, nobody has ever praised him as a top-drawer intellectual, but rather someone admired for his fighting spirit. With his surrender on amnesty he’s now thrown that all away, seriously undermining his persona.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 01, 2013 12:43 PM | Send