Hannity's softball Trump interviews

Leon Wolf:
Apparently, Sean Hannity was pretty upset with RedState on air today. Specifically, he was upset with us for running this story about the astonishing 41 fluff interviews he has given Donald Trump since Trump announced his candidacy. He blamed us for, among other things, “cutting and pasting” an article from ThinkProgress (in the blogging world, we refer to that as “blockquoting,”) and for being unfair to him with respect to the treatment of candidates.

The furor over Hannity’s softball treatment of Trump has clearly gotten to Hannity, and his executive producer has penned this lengthy blog post about the amount of time that has been given to various other Republican candidates....
...

This kind of simplistic response really misses the point of the entire article. The complaint we raised at RedState (and, quite frankly, which was noted with 100% accuracy by ThinkProgress) was not about the number of interviews given to Donald Trump, it was about the fact that when Hannity “interviews” Trump, he does so without generating any actual news or friction at all.

The last time Hannity had Cruz on his show, he spouted Trump-generated talking points at Cruz, to the point that Cruz’s campaign mused openly during the interview that they might never appear on Hannity’s show again. Hannity has likewise blasted Marco Rubio as an inauthentic flip-flopper on immigration. Hannity has aggressively grilled Rand Paul on his views about the military, foreign intervention, and torture.

When he interviews Donald Trump, it’s mostly to confront him about how awesome he is. And that was the point of the piece.
...

Which brings us to Donald Trump. The reason that Hannity is suddenly hearing it from all sides (not just RedState) about his subservient treatment of Trump is that over 60% of the Republican party realizes that Trump does not have an ideological core that is meaningfully different from Hillary’s. Moreover, we realize that every week that goes by, Trump says things that are flatly embarrassing, fundamentally non-conservative, and damaging to both the conservative and Republican brand. Any semi-competent interviewer who was even interested in appearing fair should ask at least one question of Donald Trump in any given interview that makes news.

And Hannity does not. The reason Hannity is being criticized is not that he gives an inordinate amount of air time to Donald Trump, and his response that addresses only the airtime aspect of this is a classic misdirection on this front. The reason Hannity is being criticized is that he is giving a ton of airtime to a not very good caricature of a conservative, and that he is doing absolutely nothing to expose a faker for what he is.
...
The problem with doing an interview with Cruz asking him about Trump talking points is that it fails to give Cruz the same chance he gives Trump to explain his positions on issues he deems important instead of the crap Trump is saying.  

The more you see Trump the less interesting he is.  So there is that.

We know the reason he avoids debates is because he is not sufficiently knowledgeable to defend his positions and Hannity has utterly failed to challenge Trump on his lack of understanding.

I recall in one of his earlier interviews he started off by noting for Trump that he (Hannity) was wearing one of Trump's ties.  I don't think he mentioned that it was made in China.  It appeared to me he was trying to ingratiate himself with Trump the narcissist.

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