Political WTF Moment: Sean Hannity

It’s getting easier and easier to find WTF moments in TV journalism. Today’s installment is courtesy of Sean Hannity’s interview yesterday with Dick Cheney. Prepare thyself for these questions three:

HANNITY: I read your speech to the U.S. Air Force Academy. And you went into detail talking about the same topic here. And you said, "They hate our country. They oppose everything we stand for in the world. They hold an ideology that demands complete conformity, the crushing of dissent." You talk about subjugating of women, et cetera, and you said, "They have declared their intention to strike America again and kill even greater numbers of our citizens." So we're getting further and further away from 9/11, we forget, don't we?

HANNITY: You keep, in the administration, coming under fire for Iraq. We just had elections in Iraq. The security forces are growing in Iraq.
CHENEY: Right.
HANNITY: There's still an insurgency, but there's a lot of progress. What do you make of how that war has been politicized? Where would we be today if we didn't go to Iraq?

HANNITY: Last question on judges. Two hundred and fourteen years, we've never had a judge that would have otherwise been approved by the Senate filibustered. We had this deal, seven Republicans, seven Democrats, that it might result in, basically, people not getting an up-or-down vote. Is that fair?

Now those are some hard-hitting questions. I think that the real problem here is the conflation of commentary and journalism. It’s not entirely clear in this interview who is trying to make his viewpoint known – Cheney or Hannity. Luckily, it doesn’t seem to matter in this case, since they appear to be identical. That’s the whole problem, as Andrew Sullivan succinctly pointed out. Journalism should be oppositional – it should take any politician’s words to task. Sadly, with the exception of monthly press conferences, neither the President nor Vice president has allowed journalists much opportunity to ask serious questions. No wonder people are confusing commentators with journalists on television – one is practically absent.