Media Dutifully Report Trump's Fiddling as Coronavirus Burns Through World Neil deMause CNN (3/11/20) reported that Trump's calling Covid-19 "a foreign virus aligns with how some Trump allies have described the coronavirus in recent days, which critics have called xenophobic." One of the drawbacks of much current media coverage is its reliance on official sources: If you’re a major public official, your chances of your every stray thought ending up published as fact are way higher than if you’re an average citizen, or even an expert in the subject at hand, if only because you’re putting out press statements that are easy for journalists to reprint, regardless of whether they’re factual or not. Which brings us to President Donald Trump’s speech last night on the new coronavirus. Among the things that happened yesterday when Trump got behind a microphone: He called COVID-19 a “foreign virus” and promised “the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront” it in “modern history.” He banned “all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days” to “keep new cases from entering our shores,” though later this turned out only to apply to non-US citizens (and not to people from Britain or Ireland, either, for some reason); Americans traveling abroad will still be tested (somehow) before being allowed onto planes. He announced that “I met with the leaders of health insurance industry who have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments,” which turned out not to be true (Common Dreams, 3/12/20), and that “we are cutting massive amounts of red tape to make antiviral therapies available in record time,” even though antivirals for the new virus aren’t available yet and may not be for some time (AP, 3/11/20). The Washington Post (3/11/20) reported as fact that Trump's ban on visiting Europeans was "designed to save American lives from the pandemic." The media response was largely to report on the content of the president’s speech, with only limited commentary on the existence of the emperor’s clothes. CNN’s initial report (3/11/20) called Trump’s speech a response to “harsh criticism for his response to the pandemic,” and only noted that it was “met with fierce pushback from critics” such as Joe Biden, though political analyst Chris Cillizza  (3/11/20) later called the president out for “barely veiled xenophobia.” The New York Times (3/12/20) gave Trump credit because he for the first time “acknowledged the seriousness of the coronavirus,” though they also noted his use of “accusatory language and a defensive tone that were vintage Trump,” and called the “foreign virus” line an “isolationist” view. The Washington Post (3/11/20) led off its main news story on the speech by declaring: A besieged President Trump, who was slow to treat the coronavirus as a serious threat as it has spread across the United States, announced a drastic emergency measure Wednesday night designed to save American lives from the pandemic — casting the Europe travel ban as a necessary-if-belated response, rather that the useless measure in an already virus-soaked world that health experts say it is (Vox, 3/12/20). There are two related problems here: First, when elected officials’ words are treated as worthy of seriousness just because of the nature of their office, it both gives them added weight and casts any dissent as mere political disagreement, rather than a factual correction. (New York Times news update headlines the next morning included “Europe Condemns the US Travel Ban as More Nations Add Restrictions” and “President Trump Says Restricting Travel From Europe Is Necessary”; balance!) This information is more important for the public to know than anything Trump said (LA Times, 3/10/20). And, second, it takes valuable time and screen space away from speaking to actual experts: A report by epidemiologists that unreported US infections could already be nearing 10,000 cases (LA Times, 3/10/20) — nearly as many as reported in Italy, where official case numbers are likely more accurate, thanks to far more widespread testing — received far less attention than Trump’s “foreign virus” claim. These problems aren’t limited to when it’s Trump making the public statements: As just one example, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s statement on Sunday that the city’s “disease detectives” had found that the coronavirus can only last “literally a matter of minutes” on surfaces was uncritically repeated in media reports (AMNY, 3/8/20; CNBC, 3/9/20), even though a subsequent report found that the actual time is more like three days (LA Times, 3/11/20). (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has yet to respond to a FAIR query from Tuesday on the source of de Blasio’s conclusions.) In times of crisis, people rely on the media to get them information as quickly and accurately as possible, something that’s all the more important when learning the facts and responding properly is literally a matter of life and death. The more that news reports focus on parsing the words of elected officials rather than going to the sources who can tell us what science says is really going on, the more they do a disservice not just to readers, but to the cause of stopping a pandemic.

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