Fox News executives cancelled Sean Hannity's planned Tea Party show from Cincinnati Thursday night when they learned that the organizers were selling tickets to the taping of the show -- and pricing the tickets based on proximity to Hannity. As I suggested in a post earlier Thursday, Hannity and the Tea Party were essentially involved in a co-production, and that crossed several lines of cablecasting propriety.
The conservative author and host was ordered back to New York Thursday afternoon by his bosses to do his show in-studio rather than from a hall at the University of Cincinnati that the Tea Party organizers were paying for. The university official who booked the hall told me in an email response to my earlier post that the Tea Party paid for the rent and was essentially giving Hannity a free ride on use of the hall for his cablecast.
"FOX News never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party organizers to use Sean Hannity's television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event," Bill Shine, executive vice president of programming for Fox News, said in a statement emailed to the Sun Thursday. "When senior executives in New York were made aware of this, we changed our plans for tonight's show."
I have no way of knowing what the Fox executives knew and when they knew it, but they deserve praise for pulling the plug on Hannity's Cincinnati broadcast. It shows they take themselves seriously as a news organization and are willing to anger a potentially large part of their audience and a popular host to do the right thing.
If Hannity and the Tea Party weren't in bed together in the staging of Thursday night's show, they were behind the closed boudoir door and about to turn out the light when the adults at Fox stepped in. Can you imagine what the Tea Party organizers who sold all those tickets were saying Thursday night? How about the attendees who paid top dollar?
Make no mistake about it, this is an important moment for Fox News. Senior managment put ethical standards (or at least perception) above a chance to cash in on all that Tax-Day, Tea-Party anger out there in the land, which Hannity is so good at exploiting. Remember his rable-rousing show April 15, 2009, from Atlanta?
Let's hope Hannity, who was going for the media hustler's hat trick in Cincinnati by also including a book signing at the cancelled Tea Party event, learned something about the line between shameless huckstering and being a responsible cablecaster. Let's hope he also knows now that his show does not exist solely to promote his political agenda.