The guy who found Al Capone’s vault wishes we had a guy like Sean Hannity back in the Watergate era.
The Hill (“Geraldo Rivera to Hannity: If you were around then Nixon ‘wouldn’t have been forced to resign‘”):
Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera told network host Sean Hannity on Thursday that President Nixon “wouldn’t have been forced to resign” if Hannity were around in his day.
Hannity, a vocal defender of President Trump, opened a segment on his radio show with criticism of what he perceives to be anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department probes into Russian meddling in the presidential election.
“Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74,” Rivera told Hannity on his radio show.
“It’s too bad for Nixon, because nobody like you existed then. I say that because I believe that our prime responsibility now is to unshackle the 45th president of the United States.”
Rivera is right, of course, if not for the reason he thinks. It may well be that there was no pro-Nixon media figure in the Watergate period that had the clout Hannity has today. But, more to the point, the Republican Party of that era was much less lockstep than today’s version (that’s even more true of the Democrats, who still had a huge Southern contingent well into the 1990s) and, relatedly, there was no alternate mass media for the two parties. Republicans for years charged that the national press had a Democratic bias and there was some truth in that. But everyone was watching Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and David Brinkley, or Harry Reasoner in those days and getting a reasonably balanced take on the news. For 30 minutes a day. Now, it’s possible for Trump supporters to cocoon themselves with pro-Trump conspiracy mongers.
