By Dan McLaughlin
Monday, April 20, 2020
The latest installment in the ghoulish
ongoing effort to use coronavirus deaths as a tribal red-vs.-blue bludgeon
can be found in a column
by Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times, and in the reaction to that
column on the left.
The column is framed around the death of Joe Joyce, a bar
owner from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Joyce was a Trump supporter; his son, a friend
of Bellafante’s, “was at odds with his father politically.” Bellafante admits
that Joyce was not the pro-Trump monster of media caricature: “He was not going
to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged
anywhere else. . . . In his bar Joe Joyce had set the tone for what evolved
into an incongruously progressive place. From the beginning there had been a
quiet gay presence.” But his death is too politically useful, it seems, to
resist. And with Joyce gone, his Ivy League–educated kids get the last word.
Bellafante writes:
On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife,
Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult
children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom
of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker,
healthy. . . . He didn’t see the problem. “He watched Fox, and believed it was
under control,’’ Kristen told me. Early in March Sean Hannity went on air
proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting
scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump
with this new hoax.”
March 1: Remember that date. It was the day of the first
confirmed coronavirus case in New York, a day after the first report of a U.S.
death. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio held a press briefing
about the city’s first confirmed case. Governor Cuomo reassured New Yorkers:
“Once you know the facts, once you know the reality, it is reassuring, and we
should relax. . . . What happened in other countries versus what happened here,
we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.” De
Blasio went further: “This is not, so far, something that you get through
casual contact. There has to be some prolonged exposure. And I think it’s
really important to get that information out to all New Yorkers.”
Ten days later, de Blasio was still insisting that “if
you’re not sick, you should be going about your life,” and he was still balking
at closing schools. Large gatherings were still permitted. The densely packed
subways were carrying over 5 million riders a day. As a
recent MIT analysis noted, “the parallel between the continued high
ridership on MTA subways and the rapid, exponential surge in infections during
the first two weeks of March supports the hypothesis that the subways played a
role.”
On the other hand, it is also highly unlikely that Joyce
was influenced to take a cruise, on March 1, by something Sean Hannity said on
his nightly program on
March 9. Bellafante really had an obligation to level with her readers
about the date of the quote from Hannity’s show.
March 1 was two days before the Super Tuesday Democratic
primaries. Nobody in the world of liberal commentary was talking about delaying
them. Peter Kafka of Vox, in a postmortem on how much mainstream/liberal
media outlets were still getting wrong as late as early March, noted:
While President Trump has been
correctly pilloried for describing the coronavirus as less dangerous than the
flu, that message was commonplace in mainstream media outlets throughout
February. And journalists — including my colleagues at Vox — were
dutifully repeating exhortations from public health officials not to wear masks
for much of 2020. . . .
I first started poking a few weeks
ago at the idea of whether the mainstream media should have been more alarmist
about the coronavirus sooner. When I talked to Brian Stelter, CNN’s media
reporter, on March 10, he told me he didn’t want to cause “undue fear” in his
coverage, and that extended to the way he edited the on-air chyrons that ran
during his Reliable Sources show. For instance, Stelter said at the time
that he was stripping out the word “deadly” whenever he saw the phrase “deadly
virus.” “Everyone knows it’s a deadly virus,” he said. “You don’t have to call
it ‘deadly virus’ every time. It’s a virus. We don’t call the flu the ‘deadly
flu.’”
Bellafante herself, on February 27, tweeted
about the stock market dropping on fears of the coronavirus’s economic impact,
“I fundamentally don’t understand the panic: incidence of the disease is
declining in China. Virus is not deadly in vast majority of cases. Production
and so on will slow down and will obviously rebound.”
If you got your news from the mainstream media and
Democratic politicians, you were still not getting anything like a consistent
message at the end of February and early March that this was something to
cancel your plans over. And if you did cancel them, you were probably safer on
a cruise ship than in Brooklyn, which became a center of coronavirus outbreaks.
In fact, Bellafante concedes that she doesn’t even have
any basis to say that Joyce got the virus from the cruise:
On March 14, they returned to New
York from Barcelona, and the next day, before bars and restaurants were
forced to close in the city, Joe Joyce went to work at JJ Bubbles for the
last time. He and his wife then headed to their house in New Hampshire. . . .
On March 27, when Kristen got off the phone with her father, she called an
ambulance. He was wheezing. . . . On April 9, he died of Covid-19. The
following day, Artie Nelson, one of his longtime bartenders at JJ Bubbles,
and also in his 70s, died of the virus as well. It is possible, of course,
that Joe Joyce did not contract the coronavirus on a trip to Spain. . . .
Although the combination of being on a cruise ship — a proven petri dish for
infections — and visiting a country with a full-blown outbreak is hard to
ignore. [Emphasis added.]
Let’s walk through this one. Joyce is described as
showing severe symptoms 13 days after returning from the cruise. In the
interim, he went to work at a bar in Brooklyn. Another of his bartenders got
the virus, too; we are not told whether anyone else on the cruise also got it.
Brooklyn, every bit as much as Spain, is in the midst of “a full-blown
outbreak.” There is nothing here to suggest that Joyce would have avoided the
virus by staying in Brooklyn, and there’s significant reason to believe it is likelier
that what killed him was going to work while the city was still open. That
wasn’t Sean Hannity’s doing.
Joyce’s daughter complains that her dad might have taken
this more seriously if Trump had worn a mask on television, but the governor
and the mayor somehow escape her notice. Joyce’s kids are grieving, and
grieving people say overwrought things sometimes; I don’t blame them for that.
But printing this entire thing is shoddy and shabby.
Worse, Bellafante had to know exactly what narrative role
this article would serve. Consider a sampling of the reactions from
high-profile liberal and progressive pundits on Twitter:
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine:
David Corn of Mother Jones:
Molly Jong-Fast of The Daily Beast:
Feminist author Amy Siskind:
Can we please stop doing this sort of thing? Joe Joyce
was, we are told, a good man, beloved by family, neighbors, and patrons of his
bar. He’s not here to defend himself. Do we really need to ridicule his
political opinions and his TV-watching habits just to score some points against
Fox News and Trump? How many of the people doing this would want the same
article written about them and their opinions?
You know the answer. They do, too. Shame, shame, shame.
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