The New York Times today said it would not retract or apologize for columns critical of Fox News host Sean Hannity’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic after Hannity’s attorney threatened legal action against the newspaper.
“The columns are accurate, do not reasonably imply what you and Mr. Hannity allege they do, and constitute protected opinion,” wrote Times’s legal counsel David E. McCraw to Hannity attorney Charles Harder.
“In response to your request for an apology and retraction, our answer is ‘no,’ ” the letter concludes.
The response comes after Harder sent the Times a 12-page letter on Monday calling for a public retraction and apology from the Times over a number of columns.
Most at issue is an April 18 piece by Ginia Bellafante that focused on a late Brooklyn bar owner named Joe Joyce, who took a cruise to Spain that began on March 1, and later contracted the coronavirus.
Joyce, 74, died on April 9.
It is not clear that Joyce contracted the coronavirus when he was in Spain, but Joyce’s daughter Kristen Mider told Bellafante that her father watched Fox News and believed the coronavirus was under control.
Bellafante then quoted Hannity, writing that he “went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared ‘unnecessarily.’
He saw it all, he said, ‘as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.’ ”
The first coronavirus death in the U.S. was recorded in Washington state on Feb. 29, which was one day before New York’s first reported case of the virus.
Hannity has since called the column a “smear” that exploited Joyce’s death and “pretty much all but accused [him] of murder.”
“We write concerning the New York Times’ blatant and outrageous disregard for the truth in mischaracterizing Mr. Hannity’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and blaming him for the tragic death of Joe Joyce,” Harder wrote in a letter sent on Monday.
“You have acted with actual malice in publishing the foregoing statements. As detailed herein, it was readily apparent at the time of publication that Mr. Hannity had devoted substantial, truthful coverage to the coronavirus, and his remarks attributed by you were made eight days after Mr. Joyce had already embarked on his cruise,” Harder adds.
Meanwhile, Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk, who had contributed original content to the network’s streaming service Fox Nation since shortly after its late 2018 launch.
The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus.
After rising to prominence during the 2016 election, Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson leveraged their newfound celebrity into regular sycophantic appearances on Fox News, resulting in President Trump raving about their performances, featuring them at rallies, and treating them as “senior advisers.”
The social-media personalities were eventually tapped to provide weekly videos for Fox Nation after it launched as a subscription-based online video network.
Their episodes, essentially 5-7 minute distillations of their freeform live-streams, appeared like clockwork on the streaming service until earlier this month.
The sisters’ Fox guest spots have also dried up recently.
According to a search of TVEyes, a cable-news monitoring system, Diamond & Silk haven’t appeared on the network since a March 6 interview on Fox & Friends and a March 7 hit on the now-defunct Fox Business Network show hosted by Trish Regan, who was also ditched by Fox after her own comments calling the pandemic an “impeachment scam.”
Diamond & Silk have used their heavy social-media presence to be at the forefront of right-wing misinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak.
For instance, during their March 30 livestream, the duo claimed that the number of American coronavirus deaths has been inflated to make Trump look bad.
“What I need to know is how many people have passed away in New York, and what I need to know is: Who has the bodies?” Diamond asked. “I need for somebody that does investigative work to call the morgues. To call the funeral homes. We need to know, because I don’t trust anything else that comes out of his mouth now… Something’s not right here. Something is off here.”
Silk, meanwhile, baselessly asserted that the disease was “man-made” and “engineered,” wondering aloud if there was a “little deep-state action going on behind the scenes.” She also questioned whether the World Health Organization had a “switch” to “turn this virus on and off?”