Against the backdrop of countless news stories about the covid-19 pandemic, much of the coverage from elite media centers in New York and Washington can be boiled down to this theme: Republicans generally and President Trump specifically have done a horrible job managing the novel coronavirus while Democrats have fought valiantly to turn the tide where they hold power.
Headlines on this newspaper’s website this past weekend focused on Florida — “Coronavirus ravaged Florida, as Ron DeSantis sidelined scientists and followed Trump” — and imperiled Republicans in the Senate — “As pandemic limits scrutiny, GOP fears lesser-known Democratic candidates will steamroll to Senator majority.” (Florida became the state with the second-highest number of cases over the weekend, surpassing New York.)
The awful metrics of covid-19 deaths tell a different story, according to data kept current by Johns Hopkins University. New York has suffered 32,645 deaths; New Jersey 15,804; California 8,455; Illinois 7,608; Pennsylvania 7,131; and Michigan 6,405 fatalities. All of these states have Democratic governors.
Republicans hold statehouses in some big states and there the counts look like this: Florida has seen 5,931 deaths, Texas with 5,085 fatalities and Ohio with 3,344. Arizona, also with a GOP governor, has 3,304 dead. Thus, of the 10 states with the most fatalities, the six highest tolls are all in states with Democratic leadership. Republicans run the virus response in states ranked seventh through 10th in this grim lineup.
How often have you seen those harshest of facts? Instead, the headlines trumpet new cases, where California leads with 453,155 cases, Florida with 432,747, New York with 412,344 cases and Texas with 394,927. Case numbers follow population totals fairly closely, but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is pummeled by New York and Beltway media, while New York’s Andrew M. Cuomo (D) gets at least a pass and often praise.
Cable news networks follow their well-worn ruts toward predetermined story lines and familiar refrains. Some shows have embraced narratives that seem as repetitious as the playlists of “Top 40” radio stations of decades ago.
Coverage of the protests has become just as unbalanced. With protests raging in Portland for nearly two months — and Saturday night bringing violence to other cities such as Seattle and Austin — a great deal of attention has been trained on the president’s completely legal deployment of federal officers to a few cities to protect public property but not on who is creating the mayhem and, now, firing shots. The very popular Portland Moms linking arms is a favorite picture; far less is said (or photographed) on elite outlets about the shootings, arsons and lines of black-clad anarchists.
My critique of the coverage says nothing about the epidemiology of the disease. I believe that the virus’s relentless march has been fought in good faith by every elected representative; that states hit first have been hit hardest because the public was slow to hear the alarm raised first in the third week of January — on my radio show, among other outlets — and that the public is affected primarily by deeply embedded patterns of human proximity.
New York City is crisscrossed by jam-packed subways. Florida, Arizona and California are car states. Montana and Utah are wide open and, in most places, lightly populated; Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles are dense. And where populations are older and concentrated and impoverished, the toll has been highest. The pandemic is not political. It isn’t a Republican or a Democratic disease. Reopening of states led to spread. If the mass demonstrations around Memorial Day did not contribute to spread, it is hard for me to imagine that they reduced it. Trump hoped that summer’s heat would rout the virus and that has obviously not occurred. Few have all the right calls here; life generally cannot contain an invisible virus spread by asymptomatic carriers.
But it would be easy to conclude from the coverage that Republican governors in Florida, Texas, and Arizona are uncommonly inept while their counterparts in New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois have been heroic and flawless.
The numbers do not mean voters should support Republicans to end the virus. They certainly don’t suggest Democrats have found the magic formula for beating it. But it does suggest that news coverage has been anything but balanced, or even deserves the title “coverage.”
The pandemic has been politicized by Blue Check Twitter and the editors, producers, reporters and hosts who use it as their programming compass. The goal has been not to inform the public but to cudgel the president.
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