Sean Hannity Biography

Sean Hannity is a media personality famous for his Fox News TV shows and his widely-syndicated radio talk show.

Sean Hannity grew up in New York and took a couple of stabs at college, but ended up working in construction in southern California in the 1980s. His first job in radio was as a volunteer at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1989, where he soon ran afoul of station and community standards with a program on the AIDS crisis.

Hannity’s blend of patriotism, fear-mongering and invective got the attention of radio stations in Alabama and then Georgia, however, where he worked until he was hired in 1996 by Fox News television to be the rightwing half of the political argument show Hannity & Colmes (with radio’s Alan Colmes as his sparring partner). Around the same time, Hannity got a radio gig with WABC in New York.

Since then, Hannity’s radio show has been syndicated nationally and he’s risen to the top of “shock” political radio, alongside Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Hannity & Colmes left the air in 2009, and he continued with Hannity on Fox News. He’s also published books, including Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism (2002), Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism (2004) and Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda (2010).

Hannity emerged as a fierce defender of President Donald Trump after Trump’s election in 2016. In an unusual twist, lawyers for Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen admitted in court in 2018 that Cohen had also done legal work for Sean Hannity.