The battle between ReCode co-founder Kara Swisher and Fox News’ Sean Hannity continued Wednesday night, one day after Swisher published a New York Times op-ed blaming Hannity’s employer for her mother’s refusal to take the coronavirus seriously.
“You 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,” Hannity said during his primetime show. “Yes, she’s accusing Fox News of putting her mother and the elderly people at risk.”
“In order to help the media mob out, we put it all together for them [in a timeline] so they can’t plead ignorance when I think about suing them,” said Hannity, who had already unleashed a series of tweets about Fisher earlier in the day. He referenced his Jan. 27 interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a now-recognizable leader in the fight against the virus, “six days after the first confirmed case of the United States.”
He pointed out other instances of Fox News reporting seriously on the virus and took aim at the New York Times for “using coronavirus as a political weapon.”
Swisher, too, engaged in battle via broadcast, although she opted for an afternoon livestream on Twitter while Hannity had the benefit of a primetime program that draws millions of viewers each night. She opened the stream with a joke: “What’s going on? Something happened? Something happened on Twitter?”
“I seem to have tweaked Sean Hannity, which was not my goal,” she acknowledged with a laugh. “I said I wasn’t going to sue him. In a column I did about my mom having terrible information in the early days of coronavirus and it’s because her principle way of getting news is through Fox News and so I was irritated by that.”
Swisher pointed out she wasn’t blaming “all of Fox News” and was, in fact, somewhat laudatory of primetime host Tucker Carlson, who she said “was very early to warning about the problem and treating it like science issues.”
Thursday evening, Hannity took up tweeting about Swisher once again, declaring “the fake news media never ends.” The Twitter battle looks like it will continue for some time.
See Swisher’s livestream below.
I am here to talk live about my latest @nytopinion column which apparently tweaked someone: https://t.co/dxCYMwrvrx https://t.co/8PkN7OwOj6
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) April 1, 2020