Wow. The lies coming out of The New York Times will not stop.
Today’s lie-of-the-day is yes, yet again, an attack on Fox News and Sean Hannity. The writer is one Kara Swisher, an “opinion writer.”
Here is her headline:
Fox’s Fake News Contagion
The network spent too long spraying its viewers with false information about the coronavirus pandemic.
Among other things Swisher says this:
“You can relax, Sean Hannity, I’m not going to sue you.
Some people are suggesting that there might be grounds for legal action against the cable network that you pretty much rule — Fox News — because you and your colleagues dished out dangerous misinformation about the virus in the early days of the crisis in the United States. Some might allege that they have lost loved ones because of what was broadcast by your news organization.”
She goes on to say her mother listened to Fox and therefore was given bad information on the virus. Then there is:
“Thankfully, Mom had not gone as far as claiming the coronavirus is a plot to hurt President Trump — a theory pushed by some at Fox News heavily at first.”
Stop. Full stop.
I listen to Fox every day. I listen to the entire night time lineup from The Five to Laura Ingraham’s Angle. And yes, full disclosure, I have at one time or another appeared as a guest on all three of the primetime shows – Tucker, Sean, and Laura.
In The New York Times, the prevailing view quite clearly is: Who cares about the truth? Answer: Not Kara Swisher.
At no time did I hear anyone on Fox News suggest the virus was a “plot to hurt President Trump.” What I heard was the suggestion that the liberal media’s coverage of the virus was being used to slam the President. And I certainly didn’t need Fox News or any of its hosts to come to exactly the same conclusion. After all, the results of the 2016 election were used as an excuse to summon countless barrels of cyber ink and television air time (not to mention an independent counsel investigation) slamming the President for Trump-Russia “collusion.”
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When that failed, a perfectly normal phone call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine was deliberately – say again deliberately – used as an excuse to impeach Donald Trump. With the media – yes, specifically including The New York Times – using the whole exercise to bash the President.
After three years of this garbage, is it any wonder that millions of Americans saw the liberal media’s coverage of the virus as an episode of “here we go again”?
Then Ms. Swisher blames Fox for telling people to go out and about and keep living life as if the virus were not out there. But where in the world would Fox or anybody get this idea? How about from here? Here is a Fox story from February 24:
Pelosi tours San Francisco’s Chinatown in attempt to ease fears of coronavirus
And the story reported this:
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made a visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown on Monday to assuage concerns about the coronavirus as tourism to the city’s famed neighborhood has declined in recent weeks.
‘We want to be vigilant to what is out there in other places. We want to be careful about how we deal with it,’ Pelosi told reporters while touring the neighborhood. ‘But we do want to say to be people, ‘Come to Chinatown, we are careful safe, and come join us.’”
Got that? As late as the last week of February Fox was reporting to Kara Swisher’s Mom that Nancy Pelosi was urging people “come to Chinatown.” Right.
And oh yes. When the President instituted his travel ban with China, The New York Times headlined this:
Who Says It’s Not Safe to Travel to China?
The coronavirus travel ban is unjust and doesn’t work anyway.
The story says:
“Sadly, one doesn’t have to look far for evidence of these top-down decisions morphing into outright racism within the general population, a trend that has a long history in the narrative of outbreaks such as this one.
Coronavirus shares something in common with other kinds of civil disruption, natural disasters or emergencies that affect localized travel industries: Its destructive power lies not in the actual risk but in the perception of that risk. Numerous experts have said that the majority of people who contract coronavirus will experience it as a respiratory infection they will fully recover from. But the extreme reactions — the canceling of flights, the closing of borders and level-four travel warnings — seem more appropriate for something much worse.”
What would Ms. Swisher’s Mom be learning if she read her daughter’s own newspaper? That would be that the President’s travel restriction on China was not only wrong it was – yes indeed – racist. It was an “extreme reaction” and that in reality, the real danger with the virus “lies not in the actual risk but in the perception of that risk.”And what would she be learning if she watched Fox News? She would learn no less than Nancy Pelosi herself was urging Americans to do exactly what Swisher was telling her mother not to do.
Swisher also goes out of her way to cite that recent disgraceful column in her paper by Ben Smith in which Fox is accused, falsely of course, of not taking the virus seriously. Not only was there no mention in either the Swisher or Smith columns that The Times had been assailing the President’s travel restrictions as both wrong and racist, or that Fox had accurately reported that Speaker Pelosi was urging people to get out in public to Chinatown’s restaurants and stores. There was no reference at all by Swisher and Smith that Media Matters was busy running this headline of the Fox virus coverage:
Fox News fearmongers about coronavirus with dubiously sourced viral video
Got that? Fox’s virus coverage was nothing but unadulterated fearmongering.
In short? What Kara Swisher is about here is just more anti-Fox, anti-Hannity propaganda. In The New York Times, the prevailing view quite clearly is: Who cares about the truth?
Answer: Not Kara Swisher.
