Come on, isn't there plenty of REAL crap to pin on Sean Hannity?

Far be it for me to defend Sean Hannity in any way, shape, or form, but I'm not sure that this kerfluffle about Sean! Hannity! Endorses! Scammer! Stanford! is really what we want to be hanging our hat on in impugning Sean Hannity's integrity.

I mean, we're talking about a guy who when he has nothing to rebut someone who appears on his show well-prepared, resorts to calling him a fool and an idiot. We're talking about a guy who's spending these days on a fainting couch terrified about the Red Dawn of socialism in this country, forgetting about how things like roads and bridges and even the wars he so unquestioningly supports are paid for with collective money. This is Media Matters' 2008 Misinformer of the Year. It isn't as if there isn't enough Hannity spew out there to mock mercilessly.

But if you listen to AM radio, as some of us who have Creative players instead of iPods and don't want to hassle with the little FM reciever, or who have cars old enough to lack CD players, or who can only listen to so much Ray LaFontaigne kvetcherei on WFUV, or who drive New Jersey highways to work and need traffic reports every three minutes do, you know that the ad for snake oil read on the air by the talking head is a staple of AM radio. And our side isn't above pretending to be endorsers of advertisers' products either. Thom Hartmann has recorded an ad for a New York dentist that also runs on the news radio stations. Ron Kuby reads ads for Pajamagrams, ProFlowers, and Vermont Teddybears. Rachel Maddow shills for face cream allegedly created by a plastic surgeon. And if Rachel is shilling for face cream, you know damn well that she doesn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter and I would guess none of the radio talking heads really controls who advertises. I also know that these days, you have to take whatever ads you can get, which is why Cash4Gold is now advertising on MSNBC and CNN and you can see ads for the Snuggie just about everywhere.

In the interest of at least trying to not talk completely out of my ass, for while the various soap operas of progressive talk radio and its Children of the Future slouching toward Bethlehem to be born are a source of some fascination, and while I've experienced an hour on the air as a Real Guest on a Real Show in a Real Radio Studio (albeit at Sirius studios in New York, where I felt like the host's mom in for a visit), I'm not all that versed in just how this all works. But a quick Google search revealed this press release, announcing, among other things, that Premiere networks is the outfit selling ad time on Sean Hannity's Hours o'Swill. Stanford Gold has been advertising on Hannity's show for years, which means that Citadel Broadcasting has been selling this ad time before now, and I know from the days before the late and still-lamented Morning Sedition, when I used to listen to (yes, really) Ron Kuby and Curtis Sliwa in the mornings on occasion, that when Sliwa read ads for Chamonix face cream and other preposterous products, the guy reading the copy is doing just that.

I realize that it's highly entertaining to blast Hannity for his "association" with Stanford, since he is arguably one of the ten dumbest fucking people on the planet. And his his false piety would indicate that he certainly ought to at least own up to the fact that he just reads what his bosses tell him. The problem is that if guys like Hannity and Limbaugh admit that they are just answering to their corporate masters, they lose a certain amount of Brave Cowboy Wingnut street cred. But still, I think we tubthump this to death at our peril. Because Hannity still has a voice in the public discourse that's ill-informed and destructive, and it's far more important to focus on what he says on his own than what he reads from a piece of ad copy.