(Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
Sean Hannity is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it any more!
“HANNITY SAYS ENOUGH: Sean Sues the New York Times…” his personal webpage blared Monday, in a story credited to “Hannity staff.” As Law & Crime’s Aaron Keller notes, this masterpiece of very serious journalism which accuses the Times of stealth-editing a story about the Fox host, has itself gone through several revisions since it was originally posted yesterday.
At this point, the headline and URL have been revised to “HANNITY SAYS ENOUGH: Sean Demands Retraction and Apology from New York Times After Blaming Him for Coronavirus Deaths.” But as of 1pm, the text still reads, “Something that has been long overdo, Sean Hannity has finally demanded a retraction and apology from the New York Times for their irresponsible and shameful misreporting…”
Which is really overdoing it!
The link to “court documents” takes the reader to a nastygram from Charles “Gawker Killer” Harder to the paper’s General Counsel, Diane Brayton, and columnists Ginia Bellafante, Kara Swisher, and Ben Smith. In twelve pages of bold print howling, Harder excoriates the paper for cruelly libelslandering his client by implying that he led his viewers to believe that coronavirus was a hoax. What about Bill de Blasio? What about Anderson Copper [sic]? What about Nancy Pelosi telling Americans to go to Chinatown and quit being racists? That’s what Charles Harder wants to know!
Hannity’s chief complaint appears to be an April 18 story by Bellafante which describes a regular Hannity viewer who believed the virus was not serious, took a cruise, and wound up succumbing to the disease.
On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea.
Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy; four years after he opened his bar he stopped drinking completely. He didn’t see the problem.
“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,” Kristen told me. Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily”…
Eventually, Fox changed course and took the virus more seriously, but the Joyces were long gone by then.
Harder points out that Mr. Joyce had already left for his cruise on March 1, eight days before Hannity called the panic around coronavirus a “hoax.” Harder does not point to numerous comments by his client in February downplaying the seriousness of the virus. Maybe he just forgot!
Luckily, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple can refresh Hannity’s memory.
And, as Vox was first to report widely, a team of economists associated with the University of Chicago analyzed the data to prove that watching Hannity is bad for your health in the age of COVID.
[G]reater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28. Consistent with the gradual convergence in scripts between the two shows beginning in late February, the effects on cases decline from mid-March onwards.
Which is probably why the Times told Harder and Hannity to get lost.
Because when you’re telling a bully to go pound sand, you don’t need twelve pages of inane bluster. You just say “Dear Charles … no.”
HANNITY SAYS ENOUGH: Sean Demands Retraction and Apology from New York Times After Blaming Him for Coronavirus Deaths [Hannity.com]
Hannity Hires Trump Lawyer to Threaten Lawsuit Over New York Times’s ‘False’ Coronavirus Narrative [Law & Crime]
Misinformation During a Pandemic [Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.