Workers at the New York Post have been ordered to mask up even while the newspaper slams masks and mask mandates to its readers and the public, CNN Business reported Monday.
It’s the latest searing case of hypocrisy to emerge this month in media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing News Corp world. While Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson rage against vaccines and masks, Fox last week demanded that all staff disclose their vaccination status.
The same Fox memo also encouraged even fully vaccinated people to mask up in public spaces, and it’s mandated for all in “small, confined spaces.”
New York Post workers were told in an Aug. 12 memo from Sean Giancola, publisher and chief executive of the tabloid, that “masks are required while walking the floor/not at your desk,” CNN reported.
Employees must “mask up” and “cover” their face when “away from their desk or chatting with colleagues,” according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the memo. Workers may remove masks when sitting alone at their desks.
Workers are also required to submit to a daily health screening “every day before entering the office,” so they don’t come to work sick.
Yet despite that standard for its own workers, the Post has railed against calls to mask up, incredibly blasting it as “madness” when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in July that even the vaccinated wear masks in communities with high transmission rates of COVID-19. The Post’s editorial also called the CDC recommendation “nonsense” and “pernicious.”
An earlier Post editorial even called for scrapping mask mandates on trains and buses because it claimed the health safety measure was “pointless.”
There was reportedly no mention of a vaccine requirement in the Post memo, unlike the demand from Fox News.
A disgusted Malcolm Turnbull, former prime minister of Australia, last month accused Murdoch of using his media properties to peddle lies about COVID-19 that he himself doesn’t believe just to make money by pandering to his gullible consumers.
“Rupert got himself vaccinated as quickly as he could; he’s not a fool. He knows the vaccines work,” Turnbull said in an interview.
Murdoch is “making billions of dollars out of a news channel, a news platform, Fox News, which is promoting and enabling all of this vaccine hesitancy,” Turnbull warned.
“Anybody who is “promoting these conspiracy theories about vaccines, and anyone who is discouraging people from getting vaccinated is contributing to death and disease. There’s no question about that,” Turnbull said.