Alan Colmes

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Alan Colmes (2014)

Alan Colmes (born September 24, 1950 in New York City , New York ; † February 23, 2017 ) was an American journalist , radio and television presenter . Colmes was best known as co-moderator of the political information and discussion program Hannity and Colmes , in which he accompanied the political events of the day as a "liberal" counterpart to his conservative partner Sean Hannity .

Life

Alan Colmes studied at Hofstra University . He began his public career as a stand-up comedian and eventually received various engagements with regional radio stations such as WABC, WNBC, WHN and WEVD in New York and WZLX in Boston . Colmes gained greater fame in the 1980s as the presenter of the WABC program W. Alan B. Colmes , in which he kept the audience informed about current affairs at breakfast time and on the way to work until 1988. Together with a few other radio presenters, Colmes developed the Daynet project in the late 1980s, in which he contributed his own program, The Alan Colmes Show , with which he made his breakthrough into national radio. In 1994 Daynet was sold to Major Networks, Inc. Most recently, Colmes' Radiotalk program was broadcast on Fox News Radio, owned by Rupert Murdoch .

In 1996 Colmes was inducted into the staff of the then newly founded television news channel Fox News Channel. Immediately after the start of broadcasting in October 1996, Colmes received together with Sean Hannity their own program called Hannity and Colmes , which was first broadcast on October 6, 1996. The program offered a mixture of information and debate, with Colmes and Hannity representing the two dominant poles of the American political spectrum, according to the station's official reading: While Hannity took conservative (republican) positions in a conversation with Colmes and the guests of the program, Colmes stepped up as an advocate of liberal views in the spirit of the Democratic Party. On November 24, 2008, Colmes announced his retirement from Hannity and Colmes .

Colmes himself described himself as a “liberal,” which in American parlance means “moderately left-wing” - a self-assessment that the Fox News editors endorsed in Colmes' biography on the station's website that said he was a “hard-hitting liberal” (“extremely liberal”). In an interview with USA Today , Colmes said he was just "moderately liberal."

Many critics, however, questioned the sincerity of Colmes's liberal sentiments. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared Hannity & Colmes to a faked sports match in which Colmes - according to the extremely conservative worldview of Fox News and its owners - was given the task of being defeated in every conversation with Hannity, all the more suggestively To prove to the audience the "correctness" of the conservative point of view. The documentary Outfoxed , which dealt critically with the broadcasting practices of Fox News, already saw the visual appearance of Hannity and Colmes as a form of viewer manipulation: while Hannity - the representative of the conservative view - a handsome, well-coiffed, clean-shaven, shirt-sleeved All-American guy is, Colmes - the representative of the liberal point of view - is more like a squirrel: a slim figure with glasses, a narrow face and greasy-looking hair. The makers of the documentary saw this as a subliminal hint to win over the audience in favor of conservative opinions: If "such a guy" (Colmes) takes the liberal point of view, the implied insinuation, something could obviously be wrong with this .

Occasionally, Colmes also took positions that were by no means “liberal”, such as the use of state torture. Al Franken criticized Colmes in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and accused him of not asking conservative guests unpleasant questions and indirectly supporting them. Between January and February 2006, Media Matters examined the number of interviewed Conservatives on the one hand and “Liberals” on the other and found a pro-conservative imbalance of 72% versus 28% in January and 67% versus 33% in February. In the one-on-one interviews, 80% of the invited guests were Conservatives and Republicans .

Colmes was the political scientist Jocelyn Elise Crowley , Professor (1970 *) at the Rutgers University belonging to Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy , married.

On February 23, 2017, Colmes died of lymph gland cancer at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in his hometown, aged 66 .

Fonts

  • Red, White & Liberal. How Left is Right and Right is Wrong , 2003.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sam Roberts: Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity's Liberal Partner on Fox News, Dies at 66. In: The New York Times . February 23, 2017, accessed February 23, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Steve Rendall: An Aggressive Conservative vs. a "Liberal to be Determined": The false balance of Hannity & Colmes . Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting , November 1, 2003, accessed March 5, 2017.
  3. ^ Unfair & imbalanced: Republicans and conservatives dominate on Hannity & Colmes . Media Matters for America, March 30, 20063, accessed March 5, 2017.
  4. ↑ Alan Colmes, co-host of 'Hannity & Colmes' and liberal in 'lion's den' of Fox News, dies at 66 , accessed February 19, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Colmes, Alan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist, radio and television presenter
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York , United States
DATE OF DEATH 23rd February 2017
Place of death New York City , New York , United States