Conservative talk-radio host Steve Deace said Saturday that media figures like Sean Hannity have “aided and abetted their own demise,” citing the current controversy over Hannity’s position on Fox News.
“Hannity is not being targeted because he’s a conservative,” Deace argued in a Facebook post.
Deace, a longtime conservative radio personality himself, discussed the talk-radio industry in the post. He argued that “the left” has long tried to discredit members of conservative talk radio, but are finding recent success due to specific incidents attached to big names.
“The left is always coming after us, that’s the game. We know they tolerate everything except that which they disagree with,” Deace wrote.
“But so far the only people they’ve successfully (and supposedly) taken out are people who have aided and abetted their own demise. So they certainly helped to take out themselves,” he said.
Deace’s wrote the comments while Fox News host Sean Hannity faced criticism for pushing a conspiracy theory about the death of a Democratic National Committee staffer.
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Hannity, Deace reasoned, is being targeted for his actions, not for his beliefs as a conservative.
“He’s being targeted because he’s a conservative who embarrassed his company pursuing a phony conspiracy theory, over a grieving family’s public wishes, which forced his parent company to retract its own coverage,” according to Deace.
Fox News retracted Hannity’s story, which, without evidence, tied the staffer’s death to the Wikileaks release of hacked DNC emails. Hannity pushed the story despite pleas from the family of Seth Rich asking him to stop.
While speculation has mounted over Hannity’s future at Fox News in light of the controversy, the network insisted this week that the host will return after the Memorial Day holiday. Hannity’s show lost multiple advertisers as part of the backlash.
Deace said that Hannity embarrassed himself on his own despite calls for him to halt his newscasts on the story.
“Nobody made Hannity embarrass himself. In fact, many pleaded with him to stop but nonetheless he persisted,” Deace said.
“The moral of the story: you can’t do anything about the environment, but you can do something about how you choose to behave within it,” he concluded.