Fox News anchor Sean Hannity’s primetime television show continues to dominate the cable news market, averaging more than 3 million viewers a night and obliterating his liberal competition.
But the talk radio industry has also been good for Hannity’s career in 2019. Talkers magazine, the self-described “Bible of talk media,” just awarded the conservative commentator the top spot in its Heavy Hundred list of the “most important radio talk show hosts in America.”
Sky is the limit
Produced by Premier Networks, “The Sean Hannity Show” is syndicated on over 565 affiliate stations, where 14 million fans hear from the political icon on a weekly basis. He spends more than four hours every weekday hosting his television and radio shows and providing a conservative perspective that is often lacking from his mainstream media competitors.
Although Hannity is the second most-listened-to radio talk show host in America, attracting a robust audience wasn’t enough to land the number one ranking with Talkers. “Inclusion is based upon a combination of hard factors such as ratings, revenue, and longevity, plus soft factors including effort, impact, recognition, service, talent, and uniqueness,” executive editor Kevin Casey told the Washington Times.
The list includes a diverse variety of talk show hosts, from “national icons to those laboring in relative obscurity,” Talkers notes. However, the top four spots were each awarded to nationally prominent conservative pundits.
Followed by Hannity, conservative personalities Rush Limbaugh, Dave Ramsey, and Mark Levin rounded out the top four. Shock jock Howard Stern took home the fifth-place prize, followed closely by African-American activist Joe Madison.
Newfound respect
Hannity’s television ratings have experienced a recent surge thanks to the completion of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The multimedia superstar has long maintained that the special counsel investigation targeting President Donald Trump was nothing but a partisan “witch hunt,” and he was vindicated after investigators failed to produce any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Meanwhile, Hannity’s competitors have seen their ratings tank after hitting the collusion narrative hard for the past two years. In particular, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow went from being a regular contender for the top spot in cable news to falling behind Fox News’ Tucker Carlson as the third highest-rated cable news show.
The power of audio
While Hannity’s television career has been riding high as of late, representatives from Nielsen Media Research like to remind everyone that radio programming can have the “highest reach” among all forms of media. The “news/talk” genre is especially influential, and shows of this format have dominated the industry for eight years in a row.
“Audio plays a large role in people’s media day. Evaluated through the same Nielsen lens as other media using directly comparable metrics, radio reaches more people of every generation than nearly any other content,” a Nielsen report concluded.
The media analytics company explained how the “legacy” radio audience includes 227 million people, while another 139 million people listen to radio from smartphones or tablets.
Hannity was one of the few political analysts to accurately predict the outcome of the Russia investigation, while the rest of the mainstream media propagated a fake news conspiracy theory for two straight years. Finally, he is getting the recognition he deserves.
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