The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post media reporter Jeremy Barr, asking why he withheld substantive context from his critique of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s discussion of mask efficacy. His editor and several Style section colleagues were copied.
Dear Jeremy,
Like you, I happened to be watching Tucker Carlson’s show Monday night at the time he noted what you call “an anonymous email shared on Twitter, written by someone claiming to be an air traffic controller” [“Fox hosts don’t mask their disdain,” C1, Mar. 12].
But your pro-mask, anti-Fox story offers no further context, leaving one to wonder why you didn’t fairly add one more sentence to explain that the email — anonymous or otherwise — spoke specifically to the writer’s purported experience with occasionally mask-garbled tower-to-pilot communications and related, commonsense safety concerns. Leaving out this significant detail suggests that you and your Style section editors meant to argue either that masks couldn’t possibly garble flight controllers’ speech or that, even if they could, such garbling couldn’t possibly affect the safety of airline passengers.
Are those, in fact, your intended arguments? If so, your failure to offer empirical support for them makes you guilty of the same thing you accuse Mr. Carlson of, namely the failure to substantiate a claim about mask efficacy. (BTW, I’ll bet you lunch at the soon-to-closed-forever restaurant of your choosing that an overwhelming majority of air travelers would like to know if tower-to-pilot communications are being hindered by masks or anything else for that matter.)
Of course, if withholding context about air safety was a deliberate effort to mask an intended cheap-shot at one of cable TV’s most highly rated conservative hosts, then never mind. You’re plainly just another worker bee without an original thought in your head, just following orders to get along in Jeff Bezos’s maniacal hive. Maybe “woker Bee(soz)” is a better phrase.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.