NewsBusters Columns

So let’s take a look at just what the Leftist State Media has been dishing during the coronavirus crisis. From Vox on January 31st: “Is this [coronavirus] going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” From The Washington Post on February 3rd: “Why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus. Harsh measures tend to scapegoat already marginalized populations.”

The unhinged Left compared President George W. Bush to Hitler after the dawn of the Iraq War. Hollywood trotted out similar talking points months before Donald J. Trump could utter the presidential oath. Far-left comic Sarah Silverman unofficially played the “Hitler Card” first. Silverman, who ignores the anti-semitism swirling around Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign, dressed as Der Fuhrer during a March 2016 appearance on Conan.

On March 25, Tara Reade, a former employee of Senator Joe Biden, made a disturbing accusation about her old boss. She claimed in a podcast with Katie Halper of Rolling Stone that Biden sexually assaulted her in a secluded area of the Capitol in 1993, pushing her against a wall, kissing her and penetrating her with his fingers. Where's the story from the Brett Kavanaugh-crushing media?

I confess to a certain self-interest in today's column. The media, especially newspapers, are in trouble. Conservatives like myself have been relentless in attacking their collective bias over the years, but as more of them fold or reduce staff, it is crucial the institution be saved. Margaret Sullivan, a columnist for The Washington Post, has suggested that federal bailout money should be allocated to newspapers. That is an amusing suggestion since the world's richest man, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, owns the Post. He could infuse some of his own money to prop up that reliably liberal paper.

"There are no libertarians in a global pandemic." So goes the smug punchline of large-government advocates who point to the necessity of collective action in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. Without government, they say, we'd all be dead. Few libertarians would disagree. The hardcore libertarians at Reason magazine aren't spending their days fulminating over the evils of government-required lockdown orders in the face of a fast-spreading, deadly disease. That's because they, like all other sentient human beings, recognize that collective action is sometimes necessary.

I'm not sure whether COVID-19, first identified in Wuhan, China, in the U.S. qualifies as a true disaster. Putting the disease in perspective, we might look at current influenza illnesses. According to Centers for Disease Control estimates, between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 14, 2020, there have been 390,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations as a result of the flu, 38,000,000 to 54,000,000 flu illnesses and 23,000 to 59,000 flu deaths. That's compared with, as of March 27, a total of 85,356 cases of COVID-19 resulting in the deaths of 1,246 people.

There is nothing abhorred more by the mandarins of the 24-hour news cycle than hope. Reporting must beget more reporting. If not, viewers lose interested and change channels and teleprompter readers like Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow get less face time. Hence, broadcasts of chaos, doom, and gloom must end with a promise of more doom and gloom to follow.

The enormous coronavirus “stimulus package” was festooned with goodies for key Democratic constituency groups, including $75 million in “emergency” funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which offers grants to PBS and NPR stations. That’s on top of the half-billion the Congress already authorized for the year. They call it “public” broadcasting, but it’s niche broadcasting by liberals, for liberals.

Even in this time of crisis and death, some in the news media launched partisan attacks on Republican governors regardless of actual data, including how many people have died. We see this in the media all the time: journalists often cherry-pick commentary and data to support the side they like and attack the other. Here we see an example on the left. Last week, CNN's "The Point with Chris Cillizza" published an article, “The next 5 governors to watch on coronavirus.” In it, Cillizza discussed seven governors and strongly criticized the only two Republican governors mentioned.

Call me crazy. But I had this strange idea that Americans ran America. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that every four years Americans elected a president. And that when times of crisis hit, as they occasionally do, the American people turn on their televisions, radios or, in today’s world, their computers - and listen to their freely elected leader update them on the crisis.