Kyle Smith devotes a National Review Online column to a critique of major media outlets covering the coronavirus pandemic.
How lovely it is to have a high-profile job in our major media institutions. Let’s say you completely, hideously muck up a huge story. Let’s say you spend three years wildly misleading the public. Let’s say that, at the outset of the worst public-health crisis in a century, you mock people for being afraid and tell them to go about life as usual. When you’re proven wrong, you get to tell the next chapter of the story anyway. And if you feel like saying, “No fair noticing we were wrong!” you know other members of the mainstream-media cartel will rush to support you.
Media observers are today noticing how strange it is for reporters to juxtapose panic about Florida, where the virus has done relatively little damage, with robust defense of New York, the coronavirus death capital of the Western world. …
… [A] reporter thinks it is not “useful” to report things that are true if those things happen to reflect badly on reporters? The contrast in coverage of New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida governor Ron DeSantis seems to come from some bizarro world where the media considers nine deaths per 100,000 people (Florida) to be more alarming than 142 deaths per 100,000 people (New York). As Caputo and colleague Renuka Rayasam wrote, Cuomo “has something else DeSantis doesn’t: a press that defers to him.” …
The media loves to run with “blood on his hands” stories about nefarious Republicans, but you’ll have a hard time finding even a quiet, pro-forma apology (much less an admission of bloody hands) from the media for their massive bungling of the early stages of the coronavirus story.
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