Sean Hannity declares ‘legacy media is dead’

Sean Hannity played the role of the coroner for traditional news outlets in an interview with Mediaite this morning. “That’s why legacy media is dead — they don’t know it yet, because they don’t tell the truth. They lied about the cognitive state, they lied about immigration, they lied about the economy,” he said before pulling out a list of other untruths that seemed more like an autopsy than anything else.

The irony is clear: Hannity has been working for Fox News for the last twenty-nine years, so what separates him and Fox from the media that he declares dead? Well, he would say it’s the legacy media’s lies and weaponization against Trump, evidenced by the fact that the American public voted for him anyway. “They throw everything they have at this man,” Hannity said as he went through other items in his postmortem examination, including lies about January 6, Hunter’s laptop, and the Russia/Trump scandal.

It is no secret that Trump has a friendly relationship with Fox News. In fact, NPR reported in January that nineteen Fox pundits, personalities and producers have been chosen by Trump for high-level positions in his current administration. A few of these include Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy and Tulsi Gabbard.

It’s easy to imagine Trumps sitting on his couch at Mar-a-Lago, watching Fox News while scrolling on Truth Social, before saying something like, “I like that guy — and more importantly, he likes me. Let’s put him in charge of the Department of Defense.”

Despite being unprecedented, there seems to be some wisdom to Trump’s strategy. The pattern indicates that Trump likes putting media-trained, household names from outside of the bureaucracy at the top, but places someone familiar and integrated into that world right underneath them. The only exception to this seems to be Dan Bongino, former political commentator turned deputy director of the FBI, who serves under Kash Patel as the director of the FBI.

So, is the legacy media dead? Perhaps. The White House’s shift toward allowing “new media” into the spaces of legacy news may be a good indication of what’s to come — and this afternoon press secretary Karoline Leavitt shook things up further by stripping the White House Correspondents’ Association of the power to select the press pool…