I sent a letter to Dean Baquet the other day regarding the NY Times piece on Sean Hannity. I got a robo response. So I figure I'll just tweet thread the letter out: "Mr. Baquet: On April 18, 2020, the NY Times published a story by Ginia Bellafante which claimed Mr. Joe Joyce. . .
"of the coronavirus because, his daughter said, he “watched Fox and believed it [COVID-19] was under control,” and thus it was safe to go on a cruise to Spain. Your reporter wrote, “Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way the American. . .
"people were getting scared ‘unnecessarily’.” The article further stated that because of Mr. Hannity, Mr. Joyce saw it all “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.” There was one problem with the Times column: Mr. Joyce and his wife sailed on March 1, 2020 and. . .
"returned to New York from Barcelona on March 14. Mr. Hannity’s quote cited in the original article was made on March 9, 2020. The Times essentially blamed Fox News for Mr. Joyce’s tragic death and either didn’t conduct basic journalistic due diligence and fact checking. . .
"or maliciously chose to slander Fox News and Mr. Hannity by omitting the facts. Ms. Bellafante’s original reporting was demonstrably false, and when it became clear to you and or your editors the Times made post-publication edits to the article without retracting. . .
"or formally correcting or drawing attention to the significant factual errors Ms. Ballafante made. Those errors included: Not fact-checking a source’s quote to ensure they were factually accurate; Citing a statement from Mr. Hannity that was more than a week in the future. . .
