Fox News host Sean Hannity threatened Wednesday evening to sue members of the media for slamming his coverage of the deadly coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc around the world.
The conservative commentator and host of “Hannity” mentioned the possibility of pursuing litigation during the latest episode of his primetime cable program while reacting to an opinion article published the previous day that harshly criticized how he and his colleagues have covered the coronavirus pandemic.
“You have got one far-left media mob maniac over at The New York Times using the virus to attack her least favorite network, oh, and yours truly. Accusing Fox News of putting her mother and the elderly people at risk. Now, if she actually watched our coverage and cared about truth, actually she should put a correction in her newspaper. We would know that we’ve reported without fear from the very beginning — we have our own little timeline on Hannity.com,” Mr. Hannity said during the show.
“In order to help the media mob out, we put it all together for them, so they can’t plead ignorance when I think about suing them,” Mr. Hannity added.
Authored by Times contributor Kara Swisher, a co-founder of the tech site Recode, the op-ed in question accused Fox News personalities including Mr. Hannity in particular of recklessly dishing out “dangerous misinformation” about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, the potentially deadly and highly contagious respiratory disease it causes, in turn risking the lives of Fox viewers including the columnist’s elderly mother.
Ms. Swisher again criticized Mr. Hannity’s reporting of the coronavirus when reached for her reaction Wednesday evening, CNN reported.
“What a complete shock that he won’t take responsibility for his early egregiously bad broadcasts full of misinformation and instead tries to find the flimsiest ways to attack anyone else, including people concerned about their elderly parents and trying to the truly bad information he peddled. And by that I mean it is no shock at all,” Ms. Swisher replied, according to CNN.
Fox News hosts including Mr. Hannity have come under fire in recent weeks over their coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, which started in China in late December and quickly spread across the globe in subsequent weeks.
Mr. Hannity has claimed on Fox News that the flu is “much more dangerous” than COVID-19, even though the latter is expected to kill several times more people in the U.S. this year than influenza. He has alleged last month Democrats and members of the media are “hoping Americans die” from the coronavirus and suggested they were faking concern about the outbreak to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”
More than 216,000 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed within the U.S. as of Wednesday morning, according to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University. Nationwide, more than 8,700 people have recovered from the disease and over 5,000 have died, according to the data.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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