If President Trump today began disparaging the work of the nation’s most high-profile woman tasked with managing the coronavirus health crisis, how quickly do you think the media would start calling him sexist?
The anchors at CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t bother to put their own makeup on before taking to air in her defense, no matter how small the criticism was nor whether it had any merit.
And yet the New York Times, in an extensive report on Saturday portrayed Dr. Deborah Birx, the infectious disease expert who serves as the response coordinator on the White House coronavirus task force, as a stunning example of government incompetence, while puffing up Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The 5,000-word article characterizes Birx as a failure in grasping the magnitude of what the virus would bring, a bumbling optimist who didn’t recognize the magnitude of the problem at hand.
The New York Times said that Birx functioned as a form of “affirmation” for White House officials and the president, who desperately wanted to see infections and deaths from the virus recede so that attention could turn to restoring the economy. “She was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing,” the story said.
It noted that Birx “freely roamed the West Wing, fully embracing her role as a member of the president’s team.” This is a clear suggestion that the doctor was a ditz living it up in the White House. After all, anyone who isn’t attacked by the president or doesn’t distance themselves from this administration won’t be taken seriously by the media.
On the task force guidelines for states to begin relaxing their social distancing mandates on businesses and public spaces, the New York Times said before being published the guidelines were “held closely by” Birx and “most task force members did not see them beforehand.” The implication: The dummy should have gotten input from the smarter people.
If Birx were in an important meeting and spoke up to add something, the New York Times would be the caricature of a man who would say, “What the doctor is trying to say is …”
In the New York Times’s story, Birx is the woman in over her head and Fauci is the hero to whom we should have been listening to all along.
“Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak,” the story said. “Dr. Fauci has cautioned that ‘models are only models’ and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.”
The story was also sure to point out that Fauci is “a voracious reader of political histories” who “learned to rely on reports from the ground” when assessing public health emergencies.
The condescension doesn’t even come with a courtesy disguise.
There’s no one who’s been following the pandemic who can honestly say that our leaders, including Birx, did a bang-up job in meeting the coronavirus challenge.
But it’s historical revisionism for the New York Times to prop up Fauci as the hero of this story. He made plenty of mistakes of his own.
He was initially adamant that widespread use of masks was useless. Now he swears they’re saving lives. He said in late February that there was “no need” for anyone to “change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” Now he’s a permanent advocate for extreme social distancing, advising people to stay away from friends and crowds indefinitely. And the media seem to forget, but Fauci was even an early, cautiously optimistic booster of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus infections, the same drug that Trump touted only to be blasted for weeks by the media since it has not proven 100% effective.
Did Birx get some stuff wrong about the virus? Yes, everyone did. To single her out as a failure while glorifying Fauci as the true expert is ridiculous. It’s the same sexism of which the media constantly accuse Trump, except that in this case, it’s real.
