WABC tapped Sean Hannity to fill Grant's seat in the broadcast booth. For Hannity, who had spent his career in the wilderness of the right-wing radio circuit, the gig was like a dream. "I'd grown up listening to Bob Grant...one of the most entertaining hosts I'd ever heard," Hannity wrote in his 2002 book, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism. Hannity started out as a broadcaster at the liberal University of Santa Barbara. "But it didn't last long.... The left-wing management had a zero-tolerance policy for conservative points of view. And I was promptly fired," Hannity wrote. "They didn't like the comments one guest made on the show," he added, without specifying what those comments were. From there, Hannity was hired by the right-wing WVNN in Huntsville, Alabama, and then by WGST in Atlanta, where he filled in for his friend, the "libertarian" broadcaster Neil Boortz. By the time WABC brought him on board, he was already co-hosting Fox News's newly minted Hannity and Colmes, which, as of May, was America's second-rated cable news show, with 1.3 million households viewing each night.

On WABC Hannity inherited Grant's fan base of angry white males, who listened to his show in the New York City area. Hannity recognized his audience's thirst for red meat, racist rhetoric. However, he knew that if he wanted to avoid Grant's fate, he needed an air of deniability. When "Hal from North Bergen" began calling his show, Hannity found he could avoid the dangers of direct race-baiting by simply outsourcing it to Turner.

As servile and journalistically bankrupt as Fox News host Sean Hannity behaved three weeks ago during a conversation with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it was merely prelude to the role he took on Wednesday night in an "interview" with Palin and her running mate, Sen. John McCain.