Sean Hannity is threatening to sue The New York Times for highlighting how he has downplayed the coronavirus threat. And the Times’ response? Go ahead.

Yes, the guy who has yet to apologize for baselessly smearing murder victim Seth Rich as the leaker of DNC emails to Wikileaks is suddenly very, very concerned about "mischaracterizing" in reporting.

From The Daily Beast:

Hannity retained Charles Harder—a celebrity attorney famous from Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that destroyed Gawker—to push for an apology and retraction from The New York Times over a series of columns critical of the pro-Trump host.

…

In a lengthy and bellicose demand letter sent to the Times’ general counsel and three columnists on Monday evening, Harder demanded that the paper pull down a series of stories for what the lawyer described as “mischaracterizing” Hannity’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

The stories Hannity objects to are this one, by Gina Bellafante, about Fox fan Joe Joyce who took a cruise to Spain on March 1 and subsequently died of COVID-19.

“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ [daughter] Kristen told me.

Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”

As Law & Crime noted, the crux of Hannity’s complaint is that the newspaper botched its timeline because Hannity’s “this new hoax” remark was made after Mr. Joyce left on his cruise.

But it’s not as though that was a one-off. Perhaps the Times would have been better off choosing a Hannity quote from before the cruise, such as this one, from February 26: “Let not your heart be troubled, there are only 60 confirmed cases of corona [sic] in the U.S., zero deaths, most of those infected are Americans who were repatriated after contracting the illness abroad.”

Or this one, from February 27: “And today, thankfully, zero people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus. Zero. Now, let’s put this in perspective. In 2017, 61,000 people in this country died from influenza, the flu. Common flu. Around 100 people die every single day from car wrecks.”

In fact, a University of Chicago study has found that more Hannity viewers got COVID-19 and died than viewers of Tucker Carlson, who took the pandemic more seriously earlier on.

TheWrap reports Hannity is also ticked off about Ben Smith’s March 22 column, “Rupert Murdoch Put His Son in Charge of Fox. It Was a Dangerous Mistake,” and a March 31 Kara Swisher column for having “falsely stated and falsely implied that Mr. Hannity downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.” A mashup video below shows Hannity doing exactly that.

Now, The New York Times has responded to Harder: “In response to your request for an apology and retraction, our answer is ‘no.’”

New York Times newsroom lawyer David McCraw delivers this response to @seanhannity request for retraction and apology related to @nytimes coverage: "No." Addressed to Hannity lawyer Charles Harder: pic.twitter.com/0v7URfo1kz

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) April 28, 2020

You can watch Hannity downplay the coronavirus with your own eyes and ears below, in a video from Media Matters .

(Hannity image via screen grab)