U.S. Army Specialist Daulton Radler inspects his glove fit and is shown the proper procedures for donning personal protective equipment while awaiting to forward deploy to the coronavirus testing site in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. April 2, 2020. (Master Sergeant George Roach/Pennsylvania National Guard/Handout via Reuters)Media figures on both sides of the aisle failed to appreciate the extent of the threat until it was too late. Liberals shouldnt pretend otherwise.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed virtually everything about American life, with one prominent exception: While business, the arts, and sports are all on hold, the hyper-partisan political warfare that afflicts our public square has continued at the same pace and intensity as before.
As the present crisis has developed over the past few weeks, the chattering classes have kept busy interpreting everything that happens through pro-Trump and anti-Trump prisms. Many in the mainstream liberal media are intent on settling scores with Trumps cheerleaders in the conservative media, whom they have accused of fueling skepticism about the danger posed by the coronavirus. Yet in doing so, they are ignoring the fact that many on the left were just as confused about the pandemic at its start and just as eager to play politics with it as their favorite villains on the right.
A front-page story in the New York Times this week summed up the liberal indictment of the right. Focusing heavily on Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and right-wing talkers such as Rush Limbaugh, the piece took as its conceit that they had not merely gotten the story wrong but had badly misled their audience and helped encourage the most prominent consumer of conservative media President Trump to delay implementing measures to stem the pandemics spread.
Theres no denying that many conservatives were slow to realize the danger posed by the coronavirus, and stuck to talking points about its being no worse than the flu right up until the point in mid-March when it became apparent that we were facing a full-blown public-health disaster. Their knee-jerk reaction to the first calls for action on the issue from the White House was to assume Trump was covering his political bases rather than attempting to forestall a real emergency. And many of them saw panic over the virus as a liberal plot to establish a Hurricane Katrina-style narrative in which Trump would be declared to have been derelict in his duty.
As Times reporter Jeremy Peters details, Hannity, Limbaugh, and other conservative-media figures such as Candace Owens and Dennis Prager made statements in February comparing coronavirus to the regular flu and predicting its spread should not be a cause for alarm. Peters is also right to point out that, like Trump, many on the right turned on a dime in mid March, beginning to take the threat of the virus seriously.
But the underlying assumption of Peterss thesis is that conservatives were alone in making these errors, and that assumption doesnt hold up. Liberal media outlets, very much including the Times, were also slow to recognize the impending catastrophe. And at the earliest stage of the story, when the Right and the Left dueled over Chinas responsibility for the pandemic, liberals instinctive desire to disagree with Trump on everything led many of them to downplay the threat in a different but no-less-dangerous way than the Hannitys and Limbaughs of the world.
Peters notes that although some at Fox News mocked the idea of being afraid of the virus, others such as Tucker Carlson were touting the coronavirus as a threat in late January, specifically as justification for Trumps order limiting flights from China. While Carlson and a guest, Senator Tom Cotton (R. Ark.), were, according to the Times, merely spouting talking points to justify a prejudiced decision aimed at focusing hate on a foreign enemy, their counterparts on the left were taking the bait and downplaying the threat of the virus.
On February 5, the Times published an op-ed by global-tourism reporter Rosie Spinks under the headline, Who Says Its Not Safe to Travel to China? The article, an argument against Trumps restrictions on flights from China, took the point of view that the real problem with the virus was that it was promoting hate against Chinese people and hurting the travel industry.
The same intellectual reflex motivated politicians such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and his health commissioner, Oxiris Barbot, to spend February and part of March dismissing the pandemic. They urged New Yorkers to disregard any fears about the virus and attend the Chinese New Year celebrations and parade in New Yorks Chinatown. House speaker Nancy Pelosi did the same thing while promoting the Chinese New Year festivities held in her native San Franciscos Chinatown. In retrospect, such advocacy is hard to defend given the likelihood that the virus was already starting to spread. But at the time, the looming danger wasnt yet clear, so the political needs of the moment took precedence.
Meanwhile, on January 31, the Washington Post published an op-ed by former Harvard professor David Ropeik that sought to dismiss fears about the impending pandemic as a figment of our collective imagination, mocking the notion of a global health emergency. A few days, later the Post ran another opinion piece by a pair of academics under the headline Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus, which claimed fears about the pandemic were merely an invitation to harsh measures that would scapegoat marginalized populations.
Peters can point to instances throughout the following weeks in which Fox News personalities, Limbaugh, and others on the right pooh-poohed the coronavirus as no more dangerous than the seasonal flu, highlighted those who survived the disease, and accused the media of trying to perpetuate a hoax against Trump. But a detailed look at what the Times published in its opinion pages during the same period shows that neither its editorial board nor its roster of 16 regular columnists were sounding the alarm while some conservatives encouraged Americans to ignore the danger.
The first mention of the virus in the Times opinion section came commendably early, on January 29, and seemed to warn of what was to come. But even then, the papers editorial board praised the Trump administrations foresight and offered reason for cautious optimism:
To its credit, the administration has managed to keep some of the worlds leading infectious disease experts in key roles at top agencies, including the C.D.C., the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. If those professionals are given the resources and authority to respond to the crisis as their experience and the science dictate . . . the worst-case scenarios may yet be averted.
Though Peterss article complains that right-wing pundits remained insufficiently alarmed about the virus throughout February, the Times didnt seem too concerned about it either: After January 29, its editorial board didnt mention it again for a full month. When it picked up the issue again on February 29, in an editorial entitled, Here Comes the Coronavirus Pandemic, it expressed mild concern about Trumps belief that the situation was well under control, but, like many conservative-media outlets, hedged bets about what would happen next. There is still a chance that COVID-19 will be more fire drill than actual fire, the Timess editors wrote. The vortex of fear and market-tumbling anxiety may yet pass.
The Timess op-ed columnists did no better than its editorial board. The first Times op-ed column on the issue was even more dismissive of the pandemic than anything being said on Fox News. On January 29, Farhood Manjoos Beware the Pandemic Panic argued that alarm about the virus was unwarranted. Citing false assurances from the World Health Organization, Manjoo said the real concern was not the illness itself but the amped-up, ill-considered way our frightened world might respond to it.
Like many on the right whom Peters singles out, Manjoo compared the virus to the flu and other diseases that didnt pose such a catastrophic danger to American society. He claimed that, fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic, and that it might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world. . . . We should keep this sense of caution in mind in case American politicians begin pushing for travel bans, overbroad quarantines or other measures that might not be supported by the science.
To his credit, Manjoo eventually walked this back in a column published on Feb. 26. But the qualifying excuses he offered with mea culpa could just as easily be used to justify similar mistakes made by right-wingers:
To be totally fair to myself, my reasoningin that columnwas mostly on point: At the time, the new coronavirus appeared to be a far less worrisome danger than the flu, which killshundreds of thousandsof people around the world annually. The illness, since named Covid-19, had then killed fewer than 200 people, and the Chinese governments late but immense efforts to contain it looked as if they might work.
Manjoo at least had something to say about the virus early on, however wrong it turned out to be. The other 15 op-ed columnists employed by the paper that would subsequently excoriate conservatives for their lack of early alarm remained completely silent until almost the end of February. After January 29, the virus wasnt mentioned in the Timess opinion pages until February 26, when Gail Collins chose to attack the Trump administration for its lack of urgency in dealing with the problem.
And even at that late date some of the Timess influencers were still considering the possibility that the pandemic would blow over soon. On February 29, Nicholas Kristof wrote that, Nobody knows if the coronavirus will be a big one, for it may still fizzle. As of this writing, onlyone personis known to have died from it in the United States, while thousands routinely die annually from the seasonal flu. But increasingly, experts are saying that we should get ready just in case. In the following weeks, Kristof, too, would excoriate conservatives such as Limbaugh for expressing similar skepticism.
The bottom line is that the Times didnt get consistently interested in the coronavirus until the full extent of the crisis became apparent in March, at which point its writers believed theyd found a stick with which to beat the president and his supporters. While this does not excuse the mistakes made by conservatives and the administration in the critical months before the crisis hit, it does validate right-wingers beliefs that Trumps opponents were, like the president, reacting to the pandemic primarily as a political controversy rather than a public-health threat in those months.
Predictions are a perilous business for any pundit, and much of what both liberals and conservatives published and broadcast about the coronavirus in the weeks leading up to the middle of March turned out to be wrong. Both sides made these mistakes not out of a willful desire to mislead but because they knew little about the subject, much of what they did know was wrong, and they were, as is their deeply ingrained habit, apt to interpret the latest developments as confirmation of their preexisting political biases. Neither side should now attempt to rewrite history so it casts all the blame for those early failures on the other.
Read this article:
Conservative Pundits Werent the Only Ones to Get the Pandemic Wrong - National Review
- Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal - December 11th, 2016 [December 11th, 2016]
- Liberal Democrat Voice - December 11th, 2016 [December 11th, 2016]
- Urban Dictionary : liberal - December 12th, 2016 [December 12th, 2016]
- READ MORE : Liberal groups want delay of Sessions' hearing - January 5th, 2017 [January 5th, 2017]
- What Is a Liberal - What Is Liberal Bias - January 9th, 2017 [January 9th, 2017]
- Liberal Party of Australia - Wikipedia - February 1st, 2017 [February 1st, 2017]
- Conservatives reject liberal humor in Trump era: Dave Berg - USA TODAY - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Liberal Judicial Activism Borders On Insurrection - Daily Caller - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Liberal Fake News Reportedly Growing - Yahoo News - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- House Science Chairman Sees Liberal Cover-Up on Warming Pause - Scientific American - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Furious Liberal MPs turn on 'rat' Cory Bernardi - The Australian Financial Review - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- 'Rallying point': Abbott to headline conservative Liberal fundraiser in Melbourne - The Age - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- I'm A Liberal, And I Want Milo Yiannopoulos On My Campus - Huffington Post - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Cory Bernardi says he resents being used in Liberal party 'proxy war' - The Guardian - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- HuffPo's New Editor In Chief Is Already Undoing Arianna's Liberal Legacy - Daily Caller - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Why Are Liberals Surprised by the Senate Confirmation of DeVos? - National Review - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Liberal Hashtag #NotMySuperBowlChamps Protests Patriots' Support of Trump - Fox News Insider - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- All liberals are hypocrites. I know because I am one - Quartz - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- '9th Circus'? Scholars Say Court's Liberal Rep Is Overblown - ABC News - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Economic freedom - Wikipedia - February 8th, 2017 [February 8th, 2017]
- Liberal land - Richfield Reaper - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Liberal groups file lawsuit to block Trump's deregulation order - Washington Examiner - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Strategies for Saving the Liberal Arts - Inside Higher Ed (blog) - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- This day in Liberal Judicial ActivismFebruary 9 - National Review - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- The Marco Rubio knockdown of Elizabeth Warren no liberal media outlet will cover - Conservative Review - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker proposes surprisingly liberal budget - Chicago Tribune - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Why the liberal world order is worth saving - Irish Times - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Tim Scott reads racist tweets by 'liberal left' over support for Jeff Sessions - Washington Times - February 9th, 2017 [February 9th, 2017]
- Five tips on having a safe conversation with your liberal spouse or conservative brother - Fox News - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Why Liberal Policies Are Terrible For Young People - Power Line (blog) - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Trevor Bauer goes on long rant defending tweet about liberal bias - Yahoo Sports - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Liberal Tolerance: Sen. Tim Scott Reads His Hate Mail On Senate Floor For Supporting Sessions As AG - Townhall - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Claws Out For Ivanka Trump Show Liberal Love For Women Is A Sham - The Federalist - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Trump Takes a Running Whack at the Liberal Interventionists - The Nation. - February 10th, 2017 [February 10th, 2017]
- Networks Swoon Over GOP 'Feeling the Wrath' of Liberal Town Hall Protesters - NewsBusters (blog) - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- Liberals, don't fall into the right's 'identity politics' trap - The Guardian - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- Liberal pledge: Revamp for 69 outdated schools in $560 million spend - Perth Now - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- Indians swept by Liberal in WAC action - Hays Daily News - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- Trump's attacks on the press and how the liberal media myth has empowered him - Salon - February 11th, 2017 [February 11th, 2017]
- The Paranoid Style of Anti-Trump Politics - National Review - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- What the Liberal-One Nation preference deal could mean at the ballot box - ABC Online - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Finley: Left bites Ivanka's liberal hand - The Detroit News - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- A new, liberal tea party is forming. Can it last without turning against Democrats? - Washington Post - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Since When Is Being a Woman a Liberal Cause? - The New York ... - New York Times - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- This liberal Brooklynite is on the hunt for conservative friends - New York Post - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Small-l liberal voters have been abandoned in the race to the right - The Sydney Morning Herald - February 12th, 2017 [February 12th, 2017]
- Rich, Liberal Celebrities Lecture and Claim to Stand for 'We the People' at the 2017 Grammys - NewsBusters (blog) - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- WA One Nation candidates refuse to preference Liberals - ABC Online - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- India's liberal bubble has shrunk to irrelevance in the age of Narendra Modi - Quartz - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- Liberal superhero Justin Trudeau is not immune to the forces of Trump - CNN - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- A new satire must emerge one that breaks out of the liberal bubble - The Guardian - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- A liberal Tea Party, the pope helps spring a terrorist and other notable commentary - New York Post - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- At Ole Miss, a Liberal Agitator's Education - New York Times - February 13th, 2017 [February 13th, 2017]
- Liberal Frenzy: 'Impeach' Trump; 'Traitor! Resign by Morning' - CNSNews.com - February 14th, 2017 [February 14th, 2017]
- Chelsea Clinton future run for political shunned by liberal activists ... - Washington Times - February 14th, 2017 [February 14th, 2017]
- One Nation could gain more than the Liberals from Western Australia seats deal - The Guardian - February 14th, 2017 [February 14th, 2017]
- Conservatives: Walker's budget plan is anything but 'liberal' - Watchdog.org - February 15th, 2017 [February 15th, 2017]
- Trump Says Liberal Media 'Going Crazy With Blind Hatred' - Daily Caller - February 15th, 2017 [February 15th, 2017]
- I'm a bleeding-heart liberal cleric but the Church of England must not accept gay marriage - Telegraph.co.uk - February 15th, 2017 [February 15th, 2017]
- What's a Liberal to Do When His Spouse Is a Trump Zealot? - New York Times - February 15th, 2017 [February 15th, 2017]
- Liberal Activists Join Forces Against a Common Foe: Trump - New York Times - February 15th, 2017 [February 15th, 2017]
- John Howard backs Liberal preference deal with One Nation in WA - The Guardian - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- Liberal ex-MP who called party a 'gay club' likely to be kicked out - The Australian Financial Review - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- New Liberal PAC Targets Democrats for Primaries - NBCNews.com - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- 'Liberals will continue to lose': Bill Maher defends Milo Yiannopoulos booking after panelist boycotts - Washington Post - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- Whatever happened to liberal Democrats, anyway? - Chicago Tribune - Chicago Tribune - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- Sportswriting Has Become a Liberal Profession Here's How It Happened - The Ringer (blog) - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- If the Church of England continues to smother liberal Anglicans, it is heading for a split - Telegraph.co.uk - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- Major liberal group opposes Gorsuch confirmation - USA TODAY - February 16th, 2017 [February 16th, 2017]
- The True Origins of the Phrase 'Bleeding-Heart Liberal' - Atlas Obscura - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Liberals, Tories spar over Islamophobia motion in full-day debate - The Globe and Mail - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Where Have All the Liberal Democrats Gone? - Townhall - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Vicious attacks on Ivanka Trump exposes liberal hypocrisy - The Hill (blog) - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Can Emmanuel Macron win? Why France is ripe for a liberal resurgence - New Statesman - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Victorian Liberals: factional fight exposes deep divisions - The Age - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- 10 Unfortunate Liberal Myths Conservatives Often Believe - Observer - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Terri Lovell: Liberal oppression - Santa Clarita Valley Signal - February 17th, 2017 [February 17th, 2017]
- Where's the liberal outrage over civil liberties in the Flynn case? - Minneapolis Star Tribune - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- Liberal, conservative Jews in US increasingly divided over Trump - Chicago Tribune - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- Anti-Islamophobia debate might define both Liberals and Conservatives - CBC.ca - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]