There is literally one single government to blame for the havoc that the new coronavirus has created, and it’s that of the People’s Republic of China. But you can’t ask the media to do that.
No, instead, they find blame anywhere else they can — including at Fox News.
New York Times media critic Ben Smith wrote Sunday that if not for “two crucial weeks in late February and early March” that Fox hosts harped on “a Democratic- and media-led plot against President Donald J. Trump,” we might be in tiptop shape.
“Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal,” wrote Smith. “In particular, [CEO] Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president’s early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States.”
I asked Smith what made the two weeks in February and early March more “crucial” than any other week since the end of December, when China first publicly confirmed it was treating patients for the diseased caused by the virus. “Those were the weeks when social distancing would have totally changed the trajectory of the thing,” he said. “Those were the weeks when Fox, rather than reporting on the virus story itself or other stories, was really fully ramped up in covering the media-politics story of it.”
But Smith doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It wasn’t until almost mid-March that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began publicly advising “social distancing” and warning against all but the smallest gatherings. The Trump administration had actually taken its first major step to contain the virus on Jan. 31 when Trump restricted travel from China and the State Department warned U.S. citizens against traveling to China. If anything, the first two weeks of February would have been the crucial time to start the practice, not the arbitrary dates chosen by Smith in an effort to shoehorn the facts into his narrative.
Smith also has to admit in his column that Tucker Carlson hadn’t pushed the “Democratic- and media-led plot” narrative about the coronavirus, and the most he manages to pin on Sean Hannity is his (completely accurate) complaint on-air that Democrats have been politically exploiting the virus.
“Mr. Carlson, had been a rare voice on the network urging Mr. Trump to act more urgently,” he wrote. “Even Mr. Hannity had hosted Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, early on his show and warned of the risks.”
But, said Smith, there were others, as though it were a vast and widespread problem at Fox, even though he fails to provide a single clear example of what he’s talking about outside of a Fox Business host, and she has been suspended, though it’s not clear if it was for reasons related to her coronavirus coverage.
He mentions prime-time host Laura Ingraham. But, in the sole segment Smith quotes from Ingraham’s show, and he quotes just one phrase out of a seven-minute monologue, she didn’t downplay the virus’s seriousness. In fact, part of her argument was that Trump was taking the virus seriously. She mentioned that he had restricted travel from China and declared coronavirus a public health emergency.
Ingraham did criticize the political response by Democrats and much of the media to “weaponize fear” and exploit the situation by blaming the spread of the virus on Trump. Citing multiple examples, she argued that Democrats were treating the virus as “a political godsend” and an opportunity to take Trump down. You know, like when New York Times columnist Gail Collins referred to the coronavirus as the “Trump virus.”
At no point in the segment did Ingraham treat the virus itself as a frivolous concern. Smith probably ought to provide at least one example of that happening on the channel, given that it’s the basis of his entire piece.
But, no, Smith’s entire column is a reach. Lots of writers and commentators have focused on the politics of the virus without necessarily minimizing the importance of the virus itself. It’s why the last Democratic presidential debate earlier this month rendered headlines such as “Coronavirus takes center stage at Democratic debate.” At that event, Bernie Sanders, who presumably wants a Democrat in the White House next year, accused the president of “blabbering with unfactual information, which is confusing the general public.”
The politics of it is a real story. It was certainly a bigger story in early March, before anyone (Smith included) expected to be forced into quarantine. The 2020 campaign, after all, didn’t stop with the spread of a new disease.
This isn’t Fox News’s fault. It’s China’s. But don’t ask journalists such as Smith to say that.
