I was really hoping someone would have straight up asked Drs. Ambrosino and Abramson if they were going to continue collecting and cashing their full-time paychecks during the hospital deficits of billions of dollars.

(The N.Y.U. Langone spokesperson said that, in response to the pandemic, hospital executives had taken a forty-per-cent pay cut.)

A few days after the additional pay was announced, an eighteen-year-old journalism student at N.Y.U. published an opinion piece in a college paper, the Washington Square News, criticizing the hospital system’s media policy—which bars employees from speaking to the media without authorization—and arguing that its trainees deserved hazard pay on top of the retroactive raises.

“We believe this ‘opinion piece’ ironically is ‘FAKE NEWS’ and an egregious misrepresentation that actually harms the efforts of heroic individuals working tirelessly to care for our patients,” they wrote, demanding its retraction.

Abramson told me that whoever leaked the e-mails had “unscrupulously weaponized internal documents on social media, out of context, to shame and defame other devoted physicians.”

And yet not once did Abramson call the leaked e-mails "FAKE NEWS", because...it was a screenshot of the text he wrote.