The Hermeneutics of Hannity: Format Innovation in the Space of Opinion after September 11

Methods

We rely on two insights to build our argument. The first theorizes the role of events in historical change (Sewell, 1996; Berezin, 2012). The second tells us that political life in civil society is constituted by codes, narratives and performances (Alexander et al., 2012; Alexander and Smith, 2011). These cultural elements are both the proximate ‘mechanisms’ of social change (Gross, 2009; Alexander, 2004) as well as the methods that we use to understand and interpret that change.

In recent years, sociologists have developed new understandings of the role of events in social change. Most important among these has been Sewell’s theory of ‘eventful temporality’, which contends that causality cannot be thought of as uniform across time. Sewell argues that some events, like the storming of the Bastille in 1789, are characterized by a ‘radical contingency’ that crystallize and usher in durable social change (Sewell, 1996). We think that the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011 can be classified as such an event. September 11 is a ‘political fact’ in Mabel Berezin’s (2012: 620) sense of the term because it was a ‘caesura in the flow of public time’ (Berezin, 2012: 613) that provided the opportunity for conservative actors to institute significant changes in cultural and political structures. As a collective experience that combined ‘emotional valence, collective perceptions, institutional arrangements – and implicit cultural knowledge’, the events of September 11 became resources that many Americans used to imagine and act in the world in a new way.

Importantly, the eventful nature of September 11 offered a variety of narrative hooks and focal points for media narratives. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, most narratives focused either on American unity and strength or on the nature of the Middle East and the Islamic world in general. With the passage of the Patriot Act, a new focus on the interrelated issues of security, liberty, and constitutional rights emerged. And as the Bush administration considered the possible invasion of Iraq, media debates turned increasingly to military strategy and international relations. Specific media formats varied significantly in the amount of emphasis they placed on these different narratives. For example, debates in the New York Times focused heavily on the Patriot Act and the question of Constitutional liberties, whereas debates on cable television focused much more heavily on (potential) military action, mainly in Iraq.

The focus on Iraq was particularly marked on the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes, where virtually every event connected to September 11 was discussed in a way that emphasized the narrative about military action. In the following analysis, we focus in on Hannity & Colmes, using data that were collected as part of a larger study of the space of opinion (Jacobs and Townsley, 2011: 14–15). ¹ Our aim is to show how the narrative innovations developed by Hannity and his guests addressed the inherited limitations of cable talk formats. The effect was to produce a discursive environment that was much more highly partisan and ideologically consistent than previous formats had created. The analysis has two levels. First, we document how the cultural performances of the hosts and guests on Hannity & Colmes responded to the pragmatic contingencies of televised interactions. These are settings that require performers to persuade audiences that their narratives and performances are authentic, autonomous, and interesting (Alexander, 2004). Second, we identify narrative innovations on Hannity & Colmes that deployed the deep meaning structures of civil society to parse the traumatic events of September 11. These narrative innovations not only premised a moral argument in support of war in Iraq, they also crystallized a new understanding of journalistic autonomy and an increasingly influential model for political opinion formats in the American public sphere.

Before turning to this analysis, we provide important background information on the discursive strategies of the conservative movement in the US, and we discuss how the media strategies of the conservative movement have been shaped by the larger space of opinion.

The Rise of the Right and the Conservative Media Establishment

Sociological accounts of the rise of conservatism in American politics in the last half of the 20th century emphasize the work of conservative intellectuals in fusing together various ideological and social elements to build a broadly-based conservative consensus (Gross et al., 2011; Critchlow, 2007; Medvetz, 2006; Himmelstein, 1990). These included libertarian strands, and importantly anti-Keynesian economic thinking from Hayek to Friedman, a patriotic, hawkish, and virulently anti-communist foreign policy agenda promoted by neoconservative intellectuals, and the many and varied defenders of traditional values associated with the (patriarchal) family, (heterosexual) marriage, and more generally (capitalist, western, Christian) social order. Brought to fruition in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the rise of the right is as much a story of a widespread shift in public values as it is about electoral victories, social policy, or the corporate sponsorship of think tanks.

This shift occurred on many levels: in the work of conservative student organizations and faculty against multiculturalism, speech codes, and affirmative action on college campuses (Blumenthal, 1986; Gross et al., 2011; see also Young America’s Foundation); through corporate-funded policy institutes and think tanks that lobbied for lower taxes and smaller government (Rich, 2004; Covington, 1997; Medvetz, 2006; Blumenthal, 1986); and through the electoral campaigns and social movement activity of a myriad of conservative cultural organizations in civil society (Critchlow, 2007; Gross et al., 2011). In fact, while dominant narratives of the social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s emphasize its radical nature and liberalizing effects, it now seems clear that conservatism was on the move at the same time, and that conservative groups were also beginning to mobilize (Gross et al., 2011; see also Young America’s Foundation, n.d.). A growing number of citizens came to see themselves as active conservatives in political campaigns to elect Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (Bogus, 2011; Blumenthal, 1986), the movement for tax reform in California (Smith, 1999; Lekachman, 1978), and the successful efforts of conservative women to STOP the ERA (Critchlow, 2005). In all these projects, the cultural work of conservative media intellectuals was an important factor.

Conservative intellectuals developed a new media infrastructure to self-consciously build their political and cultural synthesis. The career of William Buckley Jr. captures this long historical arc from the periphery of American cultural politics to its center (Bogus, 2011). Buckley was a major figure associated with the founding of the National Review in 1955, which along with other long-form magazines, such as Commentary, Human Affairs, and The Public Interest, provided a platform for the ‘exchange and refinement’ of conservative ideas (Gross et al., 2011). Buckley also hosted the well-regarded public affairs show Firing Line from 1966 to 1999. ² In this format, he debated public issues from a conservative perspective with a wide range of guests from politics, literature and academe. Indeed, Buckley was a pre-eminent media intellectual with an institution-spanning multimedia career as a newspaper columnist, a television talk show host, and a popular author. And while at the beginning of his career, Buckley saw himself as a lone voice representing the outpost of American conservatism in a sea of liberal orthodoxy, by the end of his career this had changed dramatically. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the overall shift of American politics to the right, and with the rise to power of the conservative media establishment, by the turn of the millennium Buckley looked a lot more like a prophet.

The rise of conservative media accelerated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Rush Limbaugh’s meteoric rise from regional radio to the center of conservative politics spans this later period and illustrates its major milestones (Chafets, 2011). Harnessing the tabloid features of talk radio, and especially its oppositional quality, Limbaugh offered conservative monologues about the news of the day. First aired in 1984 in Sacramento, the show moved to New York in 1988 where it was nationally syndicated. Within two years, Limbaugh’s audience had grown to 5 million listeners. The radio ratings firm, Arbitron, reports that Limbaugh’s show has been the most popular commercial talk radio format in America since 1991 (since statistics began to be collected systematically). Over that same 20-year period, Limbaugh’s audience has grown to an estimated 15 million listeners (Chafets, 2008, 2011; Talker’s Magazine, 2012).

Limbaugh’s rise to influence coincided with changes in the legal regulation of media corporations set in motion during Reagan’s presidency. For example, the 1987 abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act encouraged a massive concentration of media ownership as well as a proliferation of opinion-based media formats, leading to the rise of an interconnected and increasingly-powerful ‘conservative media establishment’. As Jamieson and Cappella (2008) have documented, by the first decade of the 21st century there was a fully integrated set of conservative media outlets that coordinated their formats to create an ‘enclave’ or ‘echo chamber’ for conservative beliefs. As the host of the most-listened-to talk radio program in the country, Limbaugh was an important part of this integrated network, but it also included Fox News Channel as well as the editorial and opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal (Jamieson and Cappella, 2008: ix).

These conservative media outlets worked in tandem to do the critical cultural work of defining the sacred center and symbolic boundaries of American conservatism. At the same time, they developed narratives about political bias in ‘mainstream media’, and they attempted to de-legitimate mainstream journalists’ claims about objectivity (Jamieson and Cappella, 2008: 163–76). Conservative media were not always successful in these acts of symbolic pollution, and traditional understandings of journalistic objectivity continued to exert a powerful influence over the political public sphere (Jacobs and Townsley, 2011: 72–5). But conservative pundits such as Limbaugh, Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly did manage to put mainstream journalists on the defensive. In the process, they began to articulate an alternative understanding of journalistic autonomy that they thought was better suited to the space of opinion (Jacobs and Townsley, 2011: 239–42). This is the context in which the events of September 11 intervened as a rupture in ‘business as usual’, creating a moment of cultural opportunity for conservative media intellectuals to more aggressively assert these alternative understandings about politics, media, and autonomy in the space of opinion.

The Space of Opinion, Past and Present

The study of political opinion formats is a comparatively neglected topic in research about media, democracy and the public sphere, which tends to focus on reporting the facts rather than interpretation and news commentary. This is surprising, since the role of the opinion columnist has deep roots in American journalism. Beginning with the remarkable career of Walter Lippmann in the early part of the 20th century, opinion columnists have been among the most visible and influential voices in the political public sphere (Jacobs and Townsley, 2011: 23–8). The development of television in the 1950s reinforced the importance of opinion media, as programs like See it Now and Meet the Press were organized around program hosts who insisted on their political autonomy, and who typically saw themselves as public critics acting on behalf of the public interest (pp. 10–11). While it is clear today that opinion media have a great deal of agenda-setting power in the political public sphere, this fact was already evident by the early 1960s (p. 40).

What has changed in recent years, as we have suggested, is the understandings of journalistic autonomy that underpins opinion media, particularly on cable television. In older, traditional opinion formats (e.g. Meet the Press, The NewsHour), the autonomy of the television hosts typically comes from remaining apart from any particular party, and from trying to avoid generating independent political influence. The goal is to remain autonomous from politics – to develop a position outside the rough and tumble of partisan politics. As a result, the hosts of these programs studiously avoid taking positions and instead limit themselves to asking questions of political principals and other media intellectuals. This is a traditional performance of journalistic objectivity-as-neutrality, which is associated with historical understandings of high status and prestige in the journalistic field (Clayman and Heritage, 2002).

For the new conservative opinion formats that are broadcast on cable television, there is a much different understanding of autonomy. On programs such as Hannity, The O’Reilly Factor, and the now-ended Glenn Beck, the goal is the identification of a ‘pure’ partisan position, which the host publicizes to enormous mass audiences, while remaining relatively insulated from the vagaries of electoral politics. In the newer cable television opinion formats, then, the goal is not so much to accomplish autonomy from politics, but rather to assert and maintain autonomy and influence in politics. Figures like Sean Hannity are deeply political and their political currency and authenticity come precisely from their partisan purity. The contours of these new opinion formats and their commitment to ‘partisan purity’ crystallized in the post-September 11 climate, particularly clearly for Sean Hannity and Fox News.

When Hannity & Colmes premiered in 1996 it borrowed heavily from the format of CNN’s popular opinion program Crossfire. Crossfire was organized in a manner that encouraged a discourse of political polarization. The program hosts were confrontational, and insistently pressed their guests with ideological statement/questions, which demanded an agree/disagree response. Designed to emphasize the differences between conservative and liberal positions, this format reinforced an interpretive framework in which any issue could be divided neatly into two clear and opposing positions, and every event was reduced to a moral contest pitting Republican Party principles against Democratic ones. It was entertaining television. Crossfire enjoyed great success, and it was understandable why Hannity & Colmes imitated the format.

The problem was that the narrative of political polarization eventually ran up against certain cultural limitations for the growing conservative political movement. First, because the polarization narrative was based on dueling hosts and guests, it needed to include voices that were critical of conservative politicians and conservative positions. This was not a problem for CNN and Crossfire, but it was a problem for Fox News Channel and the larger conservative establishment. In fact, the other featured program in FNC’s prime-time line-up, The O’Reilly Factor, had dispensed with the dueling-host format altogether, a change that enabled a far more consistent ideological message. As we will see, the debate about the ‘War on Terror’ that followed September 11 provided an opportunity for Hannity & Colmes to increase the consistency of its own ideological message too, and eventually premised a move to a single-host format for Hannity. A second problem was that the dueling-host format was well known by 2001. A skilled and patient guest could use this genre familiarity to her advantage to circumvent the discursive preferences of the conservative movement.

We can see this by examining a discussion on Hannity & Colmes with Jody Williams, the founding coordinator of The International Campaign to Ban Land Mines and the 1997 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The discussion began with five questions from co-host Alan Colmes, which provided Williams with the opportunity to present basic information and define the problem in her own words:

These questions are not terribly different from the ‘providing information’ requests that characterize older programs like Face the Nation and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Based on the traditional practices of objective journalism, as developed in the news interview, they allow Williams to develop a historical and humanitarian argument based on cosmopolitan ethics rather than conservative political dogma. On Hannity & Colmes, however, this does not go unchallenged. About half way through the interview, Sean Hannity initiates a much more aggressive line of questioning with the clear goal of restoring a conservative framing of the issue:

From the perspective of any theory of political communication that we choose to apply, there are problems with this exchange. Hannity’s line of questioning follows a recurrent logic of the show which asserts that criminals and other ‘bad guys’ will ignore the law, and that to think otherwise is ‘naïve’. The criticism is not really directed at Williams herself, but rather is connected to a larger critique of ‘liberals’, a label used as a pejorative signifier for the Democratic Party. Williams repeatedly tries to re-frame the discussion, suggesting that Hannity is missing the real point, which is that a ban would ultimately reduce the availability of land mines. Rather than debating the relative merits of this argument, however, Hannity relies upon a variety of non-deliberative tactics, which are increasingly inflammatory. Indeed, Hannity’s next three questions to Williams invoke what Jeffrey Alexander (2006) has called the ‘sacred evil’ of the Holocaust, and effectively close down the possibility of dialogue about land mines. ³

With this line of questioning, Hannity attempts to replace Williams’s historical narrative with an alternative historical argument, and he proposes to replace her cosmopolitan humanitarianism with a ‘fake cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2005) that is centered around the theme of national interest. His attempt was not entirely successful, however. Colmes’ initial questions had already allowed Williams to define her position, and despite Hannity’s later attempts to force the debate about land mines into a polarization narrative, Williams still managed to provide a short history of land mines, an argument about their effects on civilian populations, and a policy suggestion for how to minimize their destructive impact. This, then, was the main limitation of the dueling-host format: it allowed alternative narratives to develop that moved away from the primary conservative framing of the show.

Narrative Innovation on Hannity & Colmes

If the dueling-host format constrained the development of a monolithic conservative narrative, the events of September 11 and the ensuing discussion of the ‘War on Terror’ provided a historical opening in which these constraints were loosened. This can be seen clearly in a comparison of Crossfire and Hannity & Colmes following September 11. While Crossfire’s format stayed closely tied to the binary political polarization narrative that had animated the show through most of its history (see Jacobs and Townsley, 2011: 223–4), Hannity & Colmes responded to the crisis by developing two new narratives. The first presented September 11 as a rupture in social life around which all stories must be told. The second narrative symbolically polluted the Clinton administration as morally weak and passive, which premised an argument for urgent, aggressive military action.

One of the most important responses to September 11 by conservative media pundits was to insist on a period effect (Townsley, 2001) that drew a sharp interpretive distinction between a pre- and post-9/11 world. This meant that all strategic calculations were now different after September 11, and all prior actions and positions needed to be fundamentally re-thought. Consider the following exchange on Hannity & Colmes, between co-host Alan Colmes and former Congressman Joe Scarborough:

In this exchange, the 1991 decision not to invade Iraq is initially presented as a good precedent for thinking about how to act in 2001. It is eventually rejected as a legitimate comparison, however, because it took place before September 11 in ‘a completely different world’. This distinction was used regularly on Hannity & Colmes to reject the validity of any historical or policy argument that did not accord with conservative policy in the ‘War on Terror’. ⁴

The second narrative innovation introduced on Hannity & Colmes was based on the argument that failed actions by the Clinton administration were partly responsible for the current situation, and that Clinton’s failures provided a moral justification for war in Iraq. Consider the following exchange, between co-host Sean Hannity and Alexander Haig, the former Secretary of State during the Reagan administration:

Clinton’s failures had been a consistent theme on Hannity & Colmes throughout the 1990s, but they were re-narrated in important ways in the post-9/11 context. In fact, during the Clinton presidency Hannity had suggested that it would be a mistake for Clinton to act aggressively against Iraq, because Clinton was a morally compromised leader who lacked the respect of the military. ⁵ In December 1998, Hannity criticized Clinton’s decision to authorize a missile attack against Iraq, calling it a ‘wag the dog’ scenario designed to deflect attention away from the impeachment process. ⁶ In the aftermath of September 11, however, Hannity’s narrative emphasized Clinton’s earlier inaction as a justification for present action. Thus, while Clinton’s character position as a failed leader was a consistent element in Hannity’s narratives over time, the new narrative in support of war altered how that element was used, emphasizing how Clinton’s prior inaction now justified Bush’s impending action.

This narrative shift was naturalized and amplified by additional references to the Clinton administration’s diplomatic strategy in North Korea. The following exchange with former Congressman John Kasich is typical:

Notice how the narrative of Clinton’s weakness and failed foreign policy are explicitly linked to the historical narrative about 9/11 to bolster a moral argument for the conservative foreign policy of strength, invasion and war in Iraq. Both these narrative innovations – the historical claim about 9/11 and the narrative of Clinton’s inadequacy – allowed the show to offer a more consistently conservative position.

The narratives on Hannity & Colmes should also be seen as typical ‘high-mimetic’ war narratives (Smith, 2005): they defined the conflict as an epic struggle, in this case against the terrorist enemy, which required unwavering strength and resolute leadership, the unified support of the American people, and a division of the world into pro-American allies and anti-American enemies. This is a powerful narrative that can build real public support for going to war (Smith, 2005). The challenge for such an argument is not to be deflated by a low-mimetic alternative, which would weaken the case for war by emphasizing the complexity of the situation, the unintended consequences of potential actions, and the need for a more realist foreign policy. In fact, this kind of low-mimetic narrative was much more visible on the traditional opinion shows, such as CBS’s Face the Nation and PBS’s NewsHour, as well as on the op-ed page of the New York Times (Jacobs and Townsley, 2011: 233–4).

On Hannity & Colmes, however, the low mimetic was pre-empted through the articulation of a second high-mimetic narrative premised on the period effect attributed to September 11. The primary sources of danger, in this story, were politicians and commentators who failed to recognize that they needed a new analytical lens to understand the world after the trauma of September 11. Actions that once seemed reasonable were now unreasonable. So, for example, actions like diplomacy and coalition building were dangerous because of the way that they had emboldened the forces of evil. What was needed was a leader who was willing to ignore the 20th-century history of international relations and fight evil without reservation. Those who were unwilling to do so were naïve at best, if not outright terrorist sympathizers. This renewed sense of the high-mimetic is captured in the following description of the Nobel Peace Prize and its committee members, who are described by the neoconservative intellectual William Bennett as venal, partisan, and anti-American:

This exchange featured all the key elements of the post-9/11, conservative War on Terror narrative that had developed on Hannity & Colmes. First, there was the hero, George Bush, who was bravely and resolutely fighting the war against terrorism. Allied against him were petty, ideological ‘bureaucrats’, who had polluted the legitimacy of the Nobel Prize by using it to criticize Bush, and who threatened the security of the globe by failing to line up in support of Bush. Also polluted was Democratic ex-President Jimmy Carter, who was described as a ‘pawn’, and whose previous actions of diplomacy were dismissed later in the interview as ‘trotting around the world coddling dictators’. Clinton and all of his putative failures were also present, in the background, as the one source of historical argument that continued to be a relevant frame of interpretation in the post-9/11 context.

This was a clever and complicated reframing of the issues in the War on Terror. It was a historical narrative that managed to de-legitimate most other historical narratives. It was a high-mimetic epic of good versus evil, which managed to map onto existing political divisions without appearing contrived or disingenuous. It was a deeply political narrative that refused to give the primary framing power to politicians. In fact, it encouraged politicians to make arguments that they would never have the opportunity to voice in any other part of the opinion space. ⁷ Finally, because it was organized into a single, morally-charged narrative about good against evil, it presented an aggressive performative challenge to the low-mimetic narratives that were typical of media commentary in other parts of the space of opinion.

Conclusion

September 11 provided a moment of opportunity in which Sean Hannity and other leading voices of the conservative media establishment introduced new narratives and format innovations into the space of opinion. The development of more polarizing, partisan, and morally charged opinion was a process that had been underway for some time already, spurred by changes in media regulation, the growing importance of niche programming, the establishment of a ‘conservative media establishment’, and the general blurring of boundaries between news and entertainment. But the post-September 11 period offered conservative pundits the opportunity to establish more control over these developments; it also allowed them to more clearly articulate a new understanding about media, autonomy and political influence, which had been emerging ever since Fox News Channel arrived on the scene in 1996.

Hannity & Colmes had successfully adapted the dueling-host format that was developed on Crossfire, but as we showed, a skilled guest could use certain features of the format to introduce arguments that disturbed the ideological consistency preferred by conservative pundits. By introducing two supplementary narratives into its discussions about the ‘War on Terror’, Hannity & Colmes was able to overcome this inherent limitation of the dueling-host format and produce a discursive environment that was more ideologically consistent, more consistently high-mimetic, and more performatively authentic than its competitors. While the events of September 11 were not the single cause of the innovations on Hannity & Colmes, we argue that they provided an important opportunity for re-coding, for re-narrating, and for producing subsequent social dramas. For Hannity and the other conservative media pundits on Fox News, September 11 became the metaphor for a specifically conservative vision of America, as well as a more aggressive form of conservative television punditry. ⁸ Hannity’s cultural imprint on the network increased dramatically in the process, leading to the almost inevitable demise of the dueling-host format on Fox News, ⁹ a shift that has been imitated on other cable news channels as well. ¹⁰

The dueling-hosts format on cable television had long been associated with a rise of polarizing discourse in the political public sphere, but it is important to note that it still drew on important elements of the sacred discourse of journalistic objectivity. For most political reporting, after all, the practice of displaying objectivity had come to be associated with ‘giving both sides of the story’, in a way that allowed journalism to closely index the dominant political party divisions on any given issue (Bennett, 1990). Because the dueling-host programs such as Crossfire and Hannity & Colmes brought in hosts and guests from both ends of the political spectrum, they could still align themselves with the principles of neutrality and balance, even if they emphasized heated argument over actual reporting. With the end of the dueling-hosts format, then, cable talk shows have moved even further away from the dominant practices of the journalistic field.

The new programs have been successful at building loyal and intensely committed audiences, and they have effectively leveraged the larger media trends toward audience segmentation and transmedia convergence culture. These developments have important consequences for the larger journalistic field, and also for the field of power more generally. While a full investigation of these consequences is beyond the scope of this article, we want to conclude by considering some of the most significant consequences, as a way of pointing to possible future research directions for the cultural sociology of opinion media.

For the larger journalistic field, further research is needed to explore whether or not the cultural styles preferred in the newer formats are crowding out other formats. The newspaper op-ed page and the Sunday morning television panel shows, for example, have long contributed a distinctive set of voices and cultural styles to the debates taking place in the political public sphere. This is also true of small opinion magazines, alternative weeklies, and public broadcast media, all of which have been important sources of cultural innovation and narrative diversity. In the aftermath of September 11, it is important to investigate the ‘balance of power’ among these different formats in the space of opinion and to ask: What role do cable opinion formats play? It is not at all clear that format innovation should be the sole province of the owners and programmers of cable television networks, who are interested in meeting a very specific kind of audience segment.

For the larger field of power and the organization of politics, more research is needed to examine how the format innovations in conservative opinion media have shaped conservative party politics in the US. Has the authority to craft political narratives moved beyond the control of political party leaders? Conservative speechwriter and political strategist David Frum thinks so, lamenting: ‘Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox’. ¹¹ Contrasting the continued market success of Fox News Channel against the string of stinging electoral defeats suffered by conservative politicians in the US, Frum suggests that Republican Party leaders may need to engage in a battle with Fox News over the true meaning of conservative politics. This interpretive battle would push a hermeneutics of Hannity squarely into the political public sphere, as part of a social drama involving the soul and the future of conservative politics in the US, with significant consequences for American journalism, democracy and the public sphere.