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obvert -> RE: OT: Corona virus (5/16/2020 5:41:29 PM)
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An interesting critique of conservative media coverage of Covid written by conservative Max Diamond.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/14/fox-news-partisan-pandemic/
While the coronavirus skepticism from Fox News is fairly well-known — everything from now-former Fox Business host Trish Regan calling coverage of the pandemic an “impeachment scam” to Laura Ingraham tagging the Democratic Party as “The Pandemic Party” — an ecosystem of lesser-known but influential conservative publications has similarly responded to the crisis with dismissal, scorn and baseless theories.
I know this ecosystem firsthand — I’m a libertarian-leaning conservative and have contributed to the Washington Examiner, the Federalist and the now-defunct Weekly Standard. I believe in the principles of limited government and in the exploration of political ideas that more traditional, often left-of-center news sources don’t. But in this grave moment, conservative media has failed: More than just being out of sync with experts, much of conservative media has viewed this pandemic through an excessively partisan lens, and often seems to care more about how it impacts politics than people’s lives.
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Clearly, every day that the country is in lockdown mode, working people risk losing incomes, health coverage and savings. But the reason we’re staying at home is that, according to the experts, not the commentariat, the virus’s spread is worse than the alternative: It has been more than two weeks, for example, since White House coronavirus task force member Anthony S. Fauci estimated that U.S. coronavirus deaths could top 100,000. But many conservative writers are so dismissive, or have such an anathema to this nuance, that they choose to focus on only one side of the problem.
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And there are examples of ideological coverage from the left. The knee-jerk reaction of some progressives to use this national crisis as an opportunity to promote Medicare-for-all is similarly partisan. But even so, it is far less insidious than the coverage seen throughout conservative media that downplays the severity of the epidemic: It doesn’t risk giving people the premature impression that it is safe to continue living as normal.
Conservative commentators are at their best when they focus, in good faith, on issues they see missing in mainstream coverage. It would be useful to apply conservative principles to an examination of facts on the ground: to promote serious free-market solutions to our national testing shortage; or to influence stay-at-home policies that balance federal power with the preservation of local authority. Unfortunately, much of conservative media has chosen to use a pandemic for the purpose of scoring political points and denouncing ideological adversaries.
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