The COVID pandemic may have ended years ago, but the Media Research Center can’t stop politicizing it. Curtis Houck groused in a March 13 post:
Through Thursday morning, CBS has been the only major broadcast network (ABC, CBS, and NBC) to mention on its flagship morning or evening newscasts this week marked five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States and the life-altering lockdowns with its ramifications still playing out in American life.
On Tuesday’s CBS Mornings and CBS Mornings Plus, there were even discussions about how so-called experts got things wrong and gave mixed signals plus conceding school closures were a disaster.
Starting with the main show, co-host Gayle King — who was a longtime, dedicated believer in any and all restrictions — recalled “the coronavirus shut down life as we knew it, emptying the city streets and the office buildings, tanking the economy, bringing on social distancing and masking” and “killed more than 1.1 million Americans by the time the WHO said it was no longer a global health emergency.”
Of course, she started the conversation with former Brown University professor and Biden White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha by asking whether “Covid is still an issue today.”
[…]Jha first defended the lockdowns as having happened because “we were not prepared” and “didn’t have testing” or “good surveillance.”
That cop-out aside, he stated the obvious that “shutting down schools was a disaster, so we should never do that unless we’re at an extreme point, but even all the other disruptions, I think we can avoid them if we have a good system in place.”
Further to Dokoupil’s credit, he invoked the Barrington Declaration and its benefits, but Jha argued it wouldn’t work because the elderly should be allowed to venture out in public[.]
In fact, the Great Barrington Declaration pushed dangerous “herd immunity” at a time when the virus was still killing many people daily, vaccines had not yet been developed, and it was unclear that herd immunity would even work (and given the demonstrated need for annual vaccinations, it doesn’t).
Tim Graham whined about COVID-related things in his March 14 podcast, citing Houck’s post:
We’ve reached the five-year anniversary of when the U.S. government locked down the country to curb the Covid pandemic. It lasted much longer than “Two weeks to stop the spread.” CBS and PBS explored the anniversary, but there were no apologies for getting so much of the “science” wrong and using the pandemic so mercilessly against Trump and Republican governors in an election year.
This wasn’t a time for the networks to reflect on everything they exaggerated or simply got wrong, from the “science” of mask mandates and six-foot separations to refusing to grant any credence to the idea that the virus came from a lab in China. Most importantly, it’s downright weird that the Left can warn of “authoritarianism” under Trump when most Americans never had their freedoms more squashed than in 2020.
Curtis Houck found only CBS explored the anniversary among the Big Three. Like CBS, the PBS News Hour interviewed Dr. Ashish Jha, President Biden’s Covid coordinator. PBS anchor Geoff Bennett cited a Pew poll showing just 35 percent of Republicans thought public health officials did a good job, “and then 55 percent of all adults felt the media exaggerated the risks.”
That means 55 percent of adults were scientifically correct. They exaggerated the risks, and suggested any Republican who was skeptical of lockdowns (starting with Trump) should be considered responsible for thousands of deaths.
Graham offered no evidence that right-wingers who raged against lockdowns were actually “scientifically correct.” Instead, he ranted that Democrats, not Republicans like himself, were politicizing COVID:
So the funniest part on PBS came when Bennett asked how trust in public health could be rebuilt, and Biden’s Covid czar said, “first of all, I hate the fact that it is has become partisan. Public health has actually largely not been particularly partisan throughout American history. So this is a this is an unwelcome change.”
The first thing we should all remember is the media-Democrat complex made the pandemic a partisan issue from the first weeks, and no one is apologizing for that. Reporters at press conferences and briefings suggested every Covid death was Trump’s fault, and then when Biden came in, no one thought any deaths could be blamed on him.
But Trump is on record aggressively downplaying the risks in 2020, likely inspiring others to do the same — and, yes, likely directly causing people’s deaths.
Houck returned to repeat a right-wing report on early COVID spread in China in an April 9 post:
Our friend and 2023 MRC Bulldog Award winner Andrew Kerr put a spotlight Tuesday on the revelation that a previously censored 2022 Biden administration report on the coronavirus pandemic that he said showed “[s]even Americans may have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan in October 2019, several months before the reported start of the pandemic.”
Of course, ABC, CBS, and NBC wanted nothing to do with this and ignored it on their flagship broadcast morning and evening newscasts. The went for all shows on CNN and MSNBC.
This is not quite the “bombshell report” Houck wants you to think it is — COVID was first documented in Wuhan in Decemter 2019, so it’s probably not a surprise that some may have contracted it earlier.
Clay Waters joined the rest of the MRC in cheering the Trump administration’s revisionist, propagandist history of COVID in a April 24 post:
National Public Radio science desk correspondent Rob Stein is about five years behind on COVID origin speculation, still taking the politically correct side, that it’s beyond the pale to accuse China of letting the COVID virus leak from a government laboratory, and that the alternate theory, that COVID spread naturally from animals to humans, is unassailable: “‘Lab Leak,’ a flashy page on the virus’ origins, replaces government COVID sites.”
NPR’s previous coverage looks so embarrassing now, in its arrogant certitude, that the White House encapsulated NPR’s greatest COVID misses into a press release, in a paragraph introduced “NPR repeatedly dismissed the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab — a conclusion now deemed likely by the FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy.”
In fact, the CIA said it had “low confidence” in that assessment, and the idea that the virus developed naturally in a market in Wuhan has not been disproven.
The same day, Houck gushed over “a remarkable segment about a new book from reporter David Zweig about the wholly political behavior and unscientific actions of keeping schools shuttered long-term during the Covid pandemic, perpetuated by so-called public health experts, certain politicians, and teachers unions.” If Houck is that happy about something appearing on a non-right-wing network, that means the politics favor his right-wing bias, and his framing of school closures as “wholly political” is itself a wholly political assessment.