The headline on a Jan. 28 BuzzFeed article advised Americans, "Don't Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu." On Jan. 29, Farhad Manjoo published a column in the New York Times with the headline, "Beware the Pandemic Panic." Manjoo downplayed the danger of the virus, and instead cautioned: "What worries me more than the new disease is that fear of a vague and terrifying new illness might spiral into panic, and that it might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world." One thing we can never expect from elite journalists is accountability.
Rather than admitting his own errors, Manjoo simply pivoted to blaming Trump: "Coronavirus Is What You Get When You Ignore Science" was the headline on his March 4 column, in which he asserted that the president had "Gut[ted] the United States' pandemic-response infrastructure."
This is the "Orange Man Bad" theory of causation, where everything bad is ultimately Trump's fault, and the proponents of this theory evidently can't understand why it has cost them their credibility.
Cable-news networks didn't provide 24/7 coverage of the swine flu outbreak or blame President Obama for the spread of the disease, so why is the Chinese coronavirus such an emergency? Obvious answer: "Orange Man Bad!".
After polls showed Trump's approval ratings had risen during this crisis, the networks decided to stop carrying live broadcasts of Trump's coronavirus briefings.
As bad as the coronavirus outbreak is - and it's likely to get much worse before it gets better - we must keep it in perspective.
From now until November, the blame game will continue and if Trump gets re-elected, we'll have another four years of the same shrieking journalistic hysteria: "Orange Man Bad!".
https://spectator.org/the-orange-man-bad-disease/
Rather than admitting his own errors, Manjoo simply pivoted to blaming Trump: "Coronavirus Is What You Get When You Ignore Science" was the headline on his March 4 column, in which he asserted that the president had "Gut[ted] the United States' pandemic-response infrastructure."
This is the "Orange Man Bad" theory of causation, where everything bad is ultimately Trump's fault, and the proponents of this theory evidently can't understand why it has cost them their credibility.
Cable-news networks didn't provide 24/7 coverage of the swine flu outbreak or blame President Obama for the spread of the disease, so why is the Chinese coronavirus such an emergency? Obvious answer: "Orange Man Bad!".
After polls showed Trump's approval ratings had risen during this crisis, the networks decided to stop carrying live broadcasts of Trump's coronavirus briefings.
As bad as the coronavirus outbreak is - and it's likely to get much worse before it gets better - we must keep it in perspective.
From now until November, the blame game will continue and if Trump gets re-elected, we'll have another four years of the same shrieking journalistic hysteria: "Orange Man Bad!".
https://spectator.org/the-orange-man-bad-disease/
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