Covering a Pandemic, Election-Style
JULIE HOLLAR
 For months now, public health experts have been hammering home a crucial strategy for managing the Covid-19 pandemic: testing, tracing and isolating. Without widespread testing, you don't know where the virus is or how quickly it is spreading, and you certainly can't limit its spread except with the bluntest of tools—like complete shutdown.
But to Donald Trump, testing is "a double-edged sword." In his recent campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma—an indoor gathering of thousands of mostly unmasked people in a state experiencing a rapid spike in cases—Trump commented:
When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, “Slow the testing down, please.” They test and they test.
Trump has questioned the value of testing before, calling it "overrated" ( Wall Street Journal, 6/19/20) because increased testing leads to a rise in confirmed cases, which "makes us look bad." But his rally remarks were a remarkably brazen admission that he would rather cover up the growing pandemic than actually work to address it, at the cost of an untold number of lives.
Criticism from whom? CBS (6/22/20) made it sound like it came from Trump's political enemies, who "swiftly seized on Mr. Trump's comments."
They're remarks well worth highlighting in the media—and immediately debunking via public health experts. But to some major media outlets still apparently operating on campaign coverage auto-pilot, the story was just a “he said, she said” election story, with Trump and his aides facing off against the Biden campaign.
At CBS ( 6/22/20), headline writers told us that "Trump Draws Criticism" for his comments. By whom? If you read the lead, it's just Democrats, who "quickly denounced" Trump's suggestion, whereas Trump aides "defended his remarks." One line in the piece perfunctorily noted that Trump's "argument that the recent surge in cases in some parts of the country can be fully explained by an increase in the availability of testing has been refuted by public health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci"—but no such experts were actually quoted.
NBCNews.com ( 6/21/20) headlined a top White House aide's claim that Trump didn’t really mean what he said, with a subhead reading:
"Come on now. Come on now. That was tongue-in-cheek. Please," Peter Navarro said. "I know it was tongue-in-cheek. That's news for you, tongue-in-cheek."
NBC (6/21/20) described Trump as "joking" when he complained that so many tests are being given "people don't even know what's going on."
In addition to Navarro, a White House trade advisor, the piece also cited “a senior White House official” who said Trump "was clearly speaking in jest to call out the media's absurd coverage," as well as acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf who said Trump was speaking out of "frustration" with the media's focus on "an increasing case count." Smith himself described the president as “joking” when he contended that so many tests are being conducted “that people don't even know what's going on."
As at CBS, the only quotes from critics were from Joe Biden and other leading Democrats.
CBS and NBC might have looked to the Washington Post for a more appropriate journalistic response ( 6/21/20), where reporters put "experts" offering "harsh rebukes" in the lead (rather than Democrats), and quoted three of them in its report.
At the Associated Press ( 6/21/20), after leading with Trump's comments, reporter Kevin Freking turned to Biden's rejoinder. After quoting zero public health experts, the article concluded, with remarkable credulity:
Rising case numbers can partially be explained by the wider availability of testing. Mild cases, previously undetected because of limits on who could be tested, are now showing up in the numbers.
Sure, rising positive cases could be deceptive, if you previously weren't testing nearly enough people to capture what was really going on. In that case, if infections are dropping but you are testing far more people, you'll turn up more positives—but a much smaller percentage of your tests will be positive. On the other hand, if you increase testing and the percentage positive stays the same or increases, you clearly are witnessing an increase in cases. And if hospitalizations are likewise increasing—as they are in many of the states with rising positive cases—that certainly can't be explained away by testing numbers. It's extremely irresponsible for journalists to lend support to Trump's false claims with incomplete explanations.
Featured image: Associated Press depiction (6/21/20) of Donald Trump at his Tulsa rally (photo: Evan Vucci).
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