Hannity and Colmes

Since Hannity and Colmes doesn’t technically exist anymore, I had to go hunting around YouTube for clips from when it was still on. I probably watched around twenty clips from the show, and I think that my sentiments towards it can be best summed up by this short parody I found.

Basically, the show pretends to be a fair and balanced debate program when in reality the heavy conservative viewpoints of Hannity far out way the semi-liberal viewpoints of Colmes. I say semi-liberal because to be honest, Colmes doesn’t even seem that liberal to me. He’s closer to moderate than anything else, and it’s only when placed next to Hannity that he seems left-leaning at all. After rummaging around the net some more, I also found a survey that was done by Media Matters for America that compared the number of liberal guests versus conservative guests on the show, as well as the amount of Democratic officials that appeared compared to the amount of Republican officials. It found, perhaps not surprisingly, that 64% of all guests were identified as conservatives including a staggering 73% of elected officials. Now this might just say that liberal politicians and pundits simply knew better than to go on a program on the traditionally conservative Fox News Network, but it does not change the fact that there was a much greater conservative influence on Hannity and Colmes.

After the departure of Colmes last year, the show simply became "Hannity", and any semblance of a balanced commentary was completely eliminated, as seen in this clip.

Stupid YouTube clips aside though, I definitely have less of a problem with "Hannity" than I did with "Hannity and Colmes", and it’s not because I agree with Hannity’s viewpoints (generally speaking, I don’t). As the show exists now, it is exactly what it advertises itself as. It’s a conservative social commentary and there’s nothing wrong with that. The only issue I have is when a program claims to be unbiased, and instead is Hannity and Colmes.