Liberal Media Weaponizing COVID-19 Against Trump
The lamestream mainstream media and its bias are constant and exposed. Many Americans have nothing but contempt for that media and all that it and it’s sympathizers stand for. They need to seek objective facts instead of being liberal democrat and Chinese mouthpieces. America is in crisis and has found leadership in President Trump rallying behind him. The media should be uplifting our country instead of attacking and lying about our elected executive.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
America faces an existential threat from the COVID-19 virus, but our response is made needlessly more difficult because a partisan media has weaponized the virus as a cudgel against the president. Instead of a rallying point for America, our fight against the pandemic has become a political football.
New York Times media critic Ben Smith has even suggested that America could have averted the coronavirus crisis altogether during “two crucial weeks in late February and early March,” when Fox News Channel’s “hosts and guests, speaking to Fox’s predominantly elderly audience, repeatedly played down the threat of what would soon become a deadly pandemic.”
Let’s get the facts right.
In Mr. Smith’s cherry-picking of Fox News Channel transcripts, he ignored altogether the larger point the hosts and guests had made: the “hoax” they complained about was the partisan media onslaught against the president’s handling of the crisis, not the crisis itself.
Far from downplaying the pandemic, one of the most popular hosts on the network, Tucker Carlson, was among the earliest media figures who called attention to the crisis, as Mr. Smith himself acknowledges. Mr. Carlson’s news programming and commentary on the pandemic — like those on scores of other Fox News Channel shows — has been serious, insightful and balanced.
Mr. Smith failed to mention that another of his targets, Sean Hannity, had been among the first on any network to use his program to host a discussion of the pandemic by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Make no mistake: The complaints about media politicizing this crisis are accurate and well deserved. If anything, considering the magnitude of the crisis before us, these criticisms are understated.
Readers of The Washington Post, for instance, have been told that this deadly virus is “Trump’s Chernobyl,” while viewers of CNN’s Editor-at-Large, Chris Cillizza, learned that it is “Donald Trump’s Katrina.”
In a story that diagnosed the president as “pathological,” Slate offered a different but equally snarky take. “This isn’t Trump’s Katrina,” Slate said. “It’s stupid, slow-motion 9/11.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times’ Gail Collins’ contribution to fighting the pandemic has been to suggest a new sobriquet. Coronavirus, she suggested, should be renamed “Trumpvirus.”
At what should be — what must be — a time of national unity, a biased, one-sided national media is tearing us apart.
With millions of people at home with little else to do but play with their Smartphones, Twitter has become even more of a political war zone than usual. It has devolved into a 140-character carnival of incivility where keyboard warriors express their contempt for complete strangers who happen to support President Trump’s leadership in the crisis.
Worse yet, when the most pugnacious of the national media were called on their frenzy of partisan hate, their biggest media guns were trained on those who did so.
When Sean Hannity criticized Democrats for “using this virus as a political weapon against the president,” Salon called him a “carnival barker and Trump sycophant.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter went even further toward the ledge, citing an unnamed source purporting to be a Fox News Channel producer to claim that Fox’s coverage is “hazardous to our viewers.”
Given the media’s unbridled hostility toward the president, it might be too much to ask that for once they sheath their swords. I hope that is not the case, not now when we’re in the midst of a national emergency. There are moments when strident partisanship is singularly inappropriate, and right now is one of those.
The media’s need to control their political appetite is never greater than at a time like this. The American people are looking to them for truthful information, not politically-motivated propaganda. One need only look back to their coverage of our last national crisis — 9/11 — to see how it’s done.
• L. Brent Bozell III is founder and president of the Media Research Center.
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There you go again with "China". The far right is so predictable.
And there you go again protecting "China!" The far left is so predictable.
I know. Amazing isn't it.
People working against their own self interest simply because they hate Trump.
Amazing .....
And they don't even seem to care that people no longer trust them.
I like it when they accuse this old cold war warrior of being a Russian bot ...... just warms my cockles it does ......
They called those they hated Putin's poodles! Well, now we should call them Xi's poodles - at least we would have a grain of truth with it.
If a crisis like this can't bring them around, nothing will i'm afraid.
Can you imagine if the country had a leftist bias media during the Pearl Harbor attack? They'd be asking why we provoked the Japanese - the Japanese, whom we couldn't go to war with because they were Asian! Race would have to be injected into it!
Actually that was going on but just to a MUCH lesser degree. Had there been the mass media and instant news we have today, the Japanese and especially the Germans would be stroking their useful idiots in the US as well.
Especially Germany. A lot of sympathy for Germany in the US in the late 30's and early 40's
Is that why FDR got away with the Japanese internment camps?
Hard to argue that step back then. Much easier in hindsight but there were detractors back then. A very small minority but detractors just the same.
Kinda like the severely TDS ridden today ..... a very small minority. A lot of people don't like Trump but few hate him enough to actually defend China over the USA. That minority ....
Um-hum! And the press back then was at the very least honest. Truth mattered.
And the left is so damn blind. How many times does China have to bite us in the ass with a pandemic before some get the damn point?
What kind of rational analysis results in the conclusion that Trump is somehow responsible for the spread of a virus that originated on the other side of the world, is present in virtually every country on Earth, and is still not yet well understood in terms of how it spreads?
Warnings Ignored: A Timeline of Trump’s COVID-19 Response
" During the critical period between the outbreak in China and the landfall of coronavirus in America, Donald Trump was warned about our general vulnerabilities and the specific actions his administration needed to take to avoid the worst. This is the timeline of how he ignored them."
Great information.
OK and can you quantify what difference that made? This thing is in almost every country on Earth, several of which have more infections and death per capita than the United States. What is their excuse? Also Trump?
At this point in time, no one can 'quantify' anything, simply because we don't have or aren't given the information. However, that still does not justify his ignoring what he knew was coming. Of course, just to make things even, the bureaucracy of the FDA and the CDC didn't help matters.
Was Donald Trump Distracted from the Coronavirus Threat by Impeachment?
"Trump’s administration, however, was not paralyzed, even with the president preoccupied. On January 23, David Graham of The Atlantic argued that “even as the president’s impeachment trial moves forward, the White House is acting aggressively on a range of policy proposals that are politically, legally, or morally suspect, wagering—probably correctly—that the press and the people will mostly overlook them amid the drama in the Senate.”
To the extent that impeachment was consuming the finite attention of senior policymakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill, we can only be thankful that Senate Republicans wrapped up the trial by voting down additional witnesses on January 31. Had the Democrats gotten their wish, Washington would have been consumed for additional critical weeks into February looking backward at Ukraine instead of forward at the threat of the virus.
The American response to the coronavirus was, in retrospect, too slow and too complacent. There is plenty of blame to go around. As Jim Geraghty has detailed , any accounting begins with China, which misled the international community about the nature and scope of the original epidemic in Wuhan. The World Health Organization was at best gullible in relying on Chinese assurances to insist , into mid-January, that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.” And, yes, our own leaders dropped the ball, too.
...
Impeachment, however, didn’t cause Trump to claim on January 22 that “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China” or to tweet thanks to Xi Jinping two days later for China’s “efforts and transparency.” Nor can the failures of Trump and other federal officials to take the outbreak seriously after the end of impeachment be blamed on the distractions of January.
Presidents are supposed to be able to do multiple things at once, but they are also human, and this president is more easily distracted than most. History is full of examples of governments caught looking the wrong way at the wrong time because their leaders were too busy putting out other fires. The British Cabinet spent the early summer of 1914 worried about the Irish question instead of the dispute between Austria and Serbia over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, until, as Winston Churchill wrote later, “The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible graduations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.” Much of the story of America’s delayed reaction to the coronavirus can be told without mention of impeachment, but it is hard to deny that Washington was looking in the wrong direction until a strange light again began to fall and grow upon the map of the world."
As to star chambers, the only one I am aware of is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It seems to me that notwithstanding the USA is the world's bastion of free speech and free expression, the right wing is attempting to criticize and smother the left for voicing their opinion that the right wing demi-god Donald Trump may have been somewhat wrong in how he handled the whole matter of the virus spread.
I understand that the New York Times is now publishing a series indicating how the whole matter has been mishandled.
In my opinion, finger-pointing and blaming was really NOT the way to solve the crisis.
I thought that in America there was such a thing as free speech and free expression - and the right to criticize Are you telling me I'm wrong?
Ironic, isn't it?