The New York Times, much like NBC News has done previously, is pinning the blame for a coronavirus death on Fox News.
The reason? A Fox News viewer went on a cruise in early March and later died of the virus.
“A Beloved Bar Owner Was Skeptical About the Virus. Then He Took A Cruise,” reads the headline of the New York Times report. Its subhead added, “Joe Joyce oversaw JJ Bubbles, a welcoming tavern in a conservative corner of Brooklyn, for 43 years until he died of Covid-19.”
But it remains unknown whether the bar owner, Joe Joyce, contracted the virus while on the cruise. Another problem is that the Fox News quote supposedly downplaying the virus, the one that the New York Times cites as an example of the sort of thing that convinced Joyce to be so cavalier about the disease, was uttered after he had already left for his vacation.
Finally, there is the rather uncomfortable fact that the author of the New York Times report herself had been downplaying the virus three days before Joyce departed on the cruise. What if Joyce was a New York Times reader, even an occasional one?
The story’s author, Ginia Bellafante, reported that Joyce “set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida,” on March 1.
“His adult children,” the report added, “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.”
It continued:
Early in March Sean Hannity 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.”
Eventually, Fox changed course and took the virus more seriously, but the Joyces were long gone by then. On March 14, they returned to New York from Barcelona, and the next day, before bars and restaurants were forced to close in the city, Joe Joyce went to work at JJ Bubbles for the last time.
This is the report’s first problem. That Hannity quote is from March 9. Joyce “set sail for Spain” on March 1, according to the New York Times.
Then there is this line: “It is possible … that Joe Joyce did not contract the coronavirus on a trip to Spain, where almost 20,000 have died from complications related to it. Although the combination of being on a cruise ship — a proven petri dish for infections — and visiting a country with a full-blown outbreak is hard to ignore.”
There is also the fact that Joyce owned and worked a bar in New York City, the epicenter of the disease in the United States and perhaps the world, at this point. Health officials and even Mayor Bill de Blasio were encouraging people to go about their lives as late as March 11, a week and a half after Joyce left on his cruise.
The name “Bill de Blasio,” by the way, is not mentioned even once in the New York Times article. Perhaps Joyce was sensible enough as a rule not to listen to his city’s mayor. But, as long as we are going to cast implicit blame on Fox, what about de Blasio?
Or maybe Joyce was inspired by Bellafante herself, who tweeted on February 27: “I fundamentally don’t understand the panic: incidence of the disease is declining in China. Virus is not deadly in vast majority of cases. Production and so on will slow down and will obviously rebound.”
That tweet came just three days before Joyce left for Spain.
