Hanni-Tea In Cincinna-Tea

The big political story here in the Queen City today:  FOX News apparently wasn't real happy with Sean Hannity's decision to do his show live from the Cincy Tea Party rally yesterday, and pulled the plug on the broadcast when it became clear that the broadcast was part of the rally itself, meaning ol' Sean was using his FOX show to raise money for the Cincy Tea Party.

Fox News Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine issued a statement to the media Thursday evening saying Fox had decided to call Hannity back to New York to do the show because officials believed the Tea Party was using Hannity to make a profit at the event.

“Fox News never agreed to allow the Cincinnati Tea Party organizer to use Sean Hannity’s television program to profit from broadcasting his show from the event,” Shine said. “When senior executives in New York were made aware of this, we changed our plans for tonight’s show.”

Criticism that the Tea Party and Hannity were trying to make a profit from the event began bouncing around on blogs, including the media blog Media Matters, about two days prior to Thursday’s rally at the University of Cincinnati’s Fifth Third Bank Arena.

“Unequivocally, from our standpoint, this is wrong,” Kevin Smith, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, told Media Matters. “For a news organization to charge people for access, then take that money and roll it over to a political action group that they cover quite a bit ... There is a clear conflict of interest here.”

Cincinnati Tea Party officials said the idea that they would make money on the event is false.

“The Left drove that story, Fox capitulated to it and left,” said Chris Littleton, a Cincinnati Tea Party spokesman. He criticized Fox for not coming to Tea Party if it had concerns.

Littleton said in a statement late Thursday that the group had been unable to verify the statement from Fox News.

Hannity’s show spent about $100,000 to come to Cincinnati, Littleton said.

Several people in the audience shouted “refund!”

No, there's no conflict in interest in a news show (BIG air quotes there) going on the road, headlining at a political event, and then charging money at the gate.  Myself, I saw Hannity's "Conservative Power|" book tour bus getting off at the same exit I normally do on the way home from work last night, and that was about 6:30 PM.

This more or less proves two things:  One, Hannity's not a news show, he's a talk show host at best.  Two, Hannity clearly saw nothing wrong with coming here and being part of a political rally where money was charged for entrance.  Not only is Hannity clearly advocating the Tea Party groups, he's raising money for them in his capacity as a FOX News host.  What, was the Cincy Tea Party going to give the money back?

And before the usual suspects show up, imagine Rachel Maddow went to San Francisco to do her show live in front of an audience at an ACORN fundraising event.  Every single one of the people saying "Well that's unfair to Hannity and that's censorship!" would be throwing a screaming fit that Maddow was helping ACORN...and you'd be right in that case.

Look, not even FOX News execs could square this one away.  That's how egregious this one was.  They made the right call.

Unless we're totally dropping the "Fair and Balanced, We Report, You Decide" bullshit altogether and they've changed their slogan to "The Tea Party Network, Obama Is A Kenyan."