If you have been exposed to the online right anytime recently you may have seen this carefully curated collection of news stories holding that The Mainstream Media Got It Wrong. That is to say "They were Jest Leik Us" [sic] when it came to underplaying the novel coronavirus. Is this true? Well, kinda.
Except, uh, not. No. This is a bullshit argument. Let's look.
Look At The Dates
If you look at this wall-of-shame you can see that most of the articles are from late January or early February. By contrast here is Rush Limbaugh 5 days ago (March 31st) telling people that the death numbers for COVID-19 are being overstated by all the countries.
If you want to know how things played out on the state level?
We can argue about what "deeply belated" means (Nancy Pelosi told people on Feb 24th to shop in China Town San Francisco) but if you are trying to draw a comparison between messaging around timing, the mainstream media has it down.
What If Everyone Behaved Like Vox Readers?
The other thing to pay attention to is how quickly people changed their opinions on the novel coronavirus one thing stands out plainly: even though "the libs" were told by Vox (the left-wing 'explainer' web site) that The Flu Was The Real Danger, the fact is that once the public data changed, Vox readers turned on a dime.
Even if we assert that both the Mainstream and Right Wing media "got Coronavirus Wrong" in the beginning, there is no question that "the libs" figured out that coronavirus was a lethal danger quickly 'despite' what 'Vox Told Them.'
It has taken Fox News . . . a lot longer.
If everyone behaved like Vox Readers we'd be far, far better off.
The Lack of A Fact Immune System
The problem at the root of it is that on the right there is a lack of a fact-based immune system for their news and information. The right's distrust of fact-checkers (and concordant lack of right wing fact checkers) means that they have no backstop by which to vet bad information. If Fox or Trump says it? It's good. If they don't? Don't trust it!
This means that everything they receive is filtered through the lens of "Protect The Great Man" at all costs--even when that cost is 1000s of human lives. There's a reason that, although clearly protected by the 1st Amendment, Fox's leaders are gearing up for lawsuits concerning their lack of truthful coverage.
So don't believe it. If someone is pointing the finger at a handful of mainstream news articles they are trying to sell you a position that they already sold out of: that a portion of the media is responsible for making this pandemic far worse than it had to be.
The problem is that it's not the mainstream media. It's theirs.
“...trying to sell you a position that they already sold out of” — nice turn of phrase there, Ommie.
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