Fox News’s Sean Hannity issued a scathing rebuke of the New York Times for a column that tied his coverage of the coronavirus pandemic to a man’s death.
The Saturday column, titled “A Beloved Bar Owner Was Skeptical About the Virus. Then He Took a Cruise,” told the story of Joe Joyce, a Brooklyn bar owner and Fox News viewer who went on a cruise to Spain in March. The writer, Ginia Bellafante, linked Joyce’s death from COVID-19 to Hannity’s coverage.
Hannity addressed the column on his show Monday night, alleging that the writer “pretty much all but accused yours truly of murder.”
He then went on to demur about the way the article was written. The piece included comments from Hannity meant to illustrate that he was not taking the virus seriously and that those remarks could have convinced Joyce that it was safe to travel to Spain, a hotbed for the virus. However, Hannity made the specific comments referenced in the piece more than a week after Joyce and his wife left for their trip.
“In order to smear yours truly, they literally — this woman exploited a man’s tragic death. She willingly, maliciously, purposefully, took something I said completely out of context,” he continued before noting that he made the comments in question after Joyce left for the vacation. He also called the story “slander” and “libel.”
“Politicizing a tragedy, this New York Times so-called writer, reporter, whatever she is, has added to the pain and suffering of a family that deserves better. This was all done to vilify this program and this channel,” Hannity added.
Bellafante also faced criticism for a tweet sent at the end of February in which she appeared to downplay the severity of the virus herself, which Hannity mentioned in his rebuke. In responding to a tweet that mentioned the economic fall, she said, “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.”
This was not the first time Hannity blew up at a New York Times columnist who attacked his coverage of the virus during the early stages of the pandemic.
