As late as March 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio was still telling New York City residents to carry on life as normal: “If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.” Two days earlier, Italy had announced a national lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, and cases were already beginning to appear in New York, but de Blasio did not close the city’s schools until March 15.
Now that New York City has become the epicenter of this pandemic, de Blasio’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak appears astonishingly irresponsible. National Review has compiled a timeline of how New York City officials dealt with the crisis, and their recklessness seems mindboggling in hindsight. Early on, their main concern was that the virus might discourage city residents from attending Chinese New Year celebrations. “I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to misinformation spreading about #coronavirus,” the city’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a Feb. 9 tweet, promoting festivities in Chinatown.
As idiotic as such declarations seem now, we must note that hindsight is always 20/20, and very few Americans in early February believed that we faced any great danger of this disease becoming rampant here. Democrats and the media have spent recent weeks blaming President Trump for this crisis, but it is important to point out that the same people were downplaying the coronavirus threat just a few weeks ago. Trump’s critics want us to forget, for example, that when the president announced a ban on travel from China on Jan. 31, many of them condemned this measure as a racist overreaction. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science,” Joe Biden said the day after the China travel ban was announced, while falsely claiming that Trump had made “draconian cuts” to federal health agencies.
At that time, the known worldwide death toll from the Wuhan virus was still less than 200, and, because the Chinese government had sought to suppress facts about the disease, the scope of the danger was not apparent. The liberal media weren’t sounding the alarm, but quite the opposite. 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 the fault of the evil orange man. When journalists insist on interpreting every event from this perspective, their errors follow a predictable pattern. At one point, the danger of coronavirus was Trump’s “xenophobia,” which threatened “racial and religious minorities.” Now, we are told, the problem is that Trump is “anti-science” as seen in the New York Times which “identified” that “the science denialism of [Trump’s] ultraconservative religious allies” as the cause for the coronavirus pandemic. The “evidence” cited in such tendentious arguments is irrelevant; what matters to liberals is the conclusion, i.e., Trump is always wrong.
As they imagine themselves infinitely superior to the rest of us, the journalistic elite are self entitled to the extent they believe the dictate the narrative. Surely, Trump deserves much blame for his initial callousness, but at the same time, were his opponents and critics focusing warning the public on the impending pandemic? Of course not, they were consumed with impeaching the president over Ukraine, and when that anti-Trump crusade failed, they were in a panic about the potential of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. It was not until early March — after Biden’s wins on Super Tuesday stopped the Sanders threat — that the coronavirus pandemic became the media’s obsession. It was March 6 that an MSNBC panel discussion hosted by Nicolle Wallace turned into a sort of pep rally for coronavirus, with the guests expressing the enthusiastic hope that the pandemic would become “Trump’s Katrina.”
Having made clear their intention of scapegoating the president for this virus from China, the media are in a holding pattern on trying to recall what exactly the administration did during January and February though polls have showed Trump’s approval ratings in a steady holding pattern. The networks decided to stop carrying live broadcasts of Trump’s coronavirus briefings or just call it a propaganda session while engaging in hostile exchanges with the administration. We can refer to the testy exchange from Trump and CBS reporter Weijia Jiang or PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor, whom even went as far as to implying Trump’s Surgeon General, who is African American, is racist. The questions they post to the administration usually centers on what the first months of the pandemic, whether they reacted adequately. Yet, if we look at the anger and glare in their eyes (or the chyron), it is as if they are interrogating a felon, that they must make the administration admit that they are murderers. There are a lot more of these banter that we can find online, as this has become the latest reality TV hit, at the same time, it also reminds me two famous lines from Star Wars, that “fear is the path to the dark side, fear leads the anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering”. Reporters are filled with fear that a man whom they loathe so much, buttressed by his “far right” ignorant supporters that they are using their aggressive feeling, letting their fear flow through them, ultimately clouding their own judgement.
I am not a medical expert, and I am also not a member of the orange man bad camp, or of the Trump the 4D chess master camp. The Trump administration was slow in response to the pandemic, at the same time, throughout the daily press briefing, Trump has not been doing himself a favor by being himself, making grossly vague statements that lead to war of words between him and the press. Such as the previously scuffle suggesting the use of malaria treatment medication that was being tied to “murdering” a woman who asked her husband to drink fish tank cleaner, or how he used the term “injecting” Lysol and UV rays that is now being referred to physically injecting into human body, he is his own worst enemy.
The president should not have spoken about theoretical virus treatments. But he obviously was not urging people to apply half-baked theories, or to seek any medical treatments without a doctor’s approval. He was opining on potential treatments he had been told that medical experts were testing, and speculated they should be testing, to determine their effectiveness. It is fair enough to fret that when people hear a president of the United States speak about potential remedies during a health crisis, they probably assume there is sound science behind them — and maybe even to worry that some people will be daft enough to try them. But when the president’s comments include statements showing he was encouraging scientists to conduct safe experiments, not recklessly encouraging Americans to experiment on themselves without a doctor’s supervision, it is dishonest not to report those statements.
While it is good for the president to project engaged leadership, that should never take the form of free-flowing dialogue with his advisers. Those conversations should happen behind closed doors and when any leader speaks publicly, he should stick to what he is in a position to convey factually. Especially when it comes to scientific and medical information, as to which he is quickly out of his depth. Yet at the same time, no matter how much the press abhors Trump, no matter how they sincerely believe in their own conviction that he is a dangerous man who will induce people to do dangerous things, reporters worthy of the name do not have license to portray Trump as living down to their worst fears when he has not. If he says dumb things, they should report that he said dumb things, there are a copious of these instances, and they speak for themselves sufficiently. After years of claiming “bombshells” that mark the “beginning of the end” and “walls are closing in” of the Trump presidency and destroying its own credibility step by step by reporting the president’s ill-advised statements as if they were culpably, recklessly irresponsible remarks that lead the catastrophe, I am not sure who are the ones that are actually most ignorant.
I am not endorsing false equivalency, we are all aware of what the WHO was publicly stating during that those months. Now, if we were to think that said elite global institution is the premier guideline for nations to follow, then at the same time blaming the administration to supposedly cut funding to bureaucratic agencies in charge of pandemic response, are we supposed to think that these bureaucrats can actually adequately and faithfully respond to an emergency? Similarly, a lot of the figures our governments rely upon are from projects based on models and algorithms. As healthcare industries around the world have not grappled with Covid-19 before, any models are merely projections and references at best. For example, we often hear stock analysts make “projected earning” of publicly traded companies, yet when their projections are wrong, its often phrased in a way that is “performance surpasses/misses projection” rather then just simply stating the “projection was wrong”. The reason I am referring to projection is as global economy has come to a halt, the most important topic of discussion now is not whether who is to blame for previous shortcoming, but what governments ought to do to re-open the economy. Rather than being snarky like Thomas Friedman and suggesting Trump is playing “Russian Roulette” with people’s lives, the most important fact we must realize is data, while being “conclusive” is also “inconclusive” in the sense that it is constantly changing. The most that any government could do is to preach social distancing, while gradually re-opening incrementally.
While I do have my own political beliefs which have been thoroughly conveyed in my previous writings, I also understand that during this trying time, a lot of decisions are made on the fly and mistakes would be made and then readjusted base on present situation. In Taiwan, we have learned our lesson in pandemic response from two decades ago, but the US during the months leading up to the March outbreak, was immersed in “positive optimistic bias” because they have not faced any major health crisis since the Spanish Flu early in the 20th century. This form of selection bias not only makes it hard for them to perceive threats; to the point that it downplayed warning signs. For all parties to simply try to steer the discourse to place the blame on any specific party would be a dereliction of duty and I hope the discussion can move towards a discussion on how to properly reopen the economy and sufficient prevention for future outbreak.
執行編輯：張詠晴
核稿編輯：張翔一
