By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
If anyone wonders why so many people conclude that they
should believe the opposite of whatever the media are saying, this past week
provides a good explanation.
Andrew Cuomo, the Emmy Award–winning governor that a
swooning press held up as the enlightened standard for an effective pandemic
response, didn’t just make a disastrous mistake in his handling of nursing
homes. He didn’t just miscount nursing-home fatalities. He may have covered
up nursing-home fatalities.
It turns out that everything the press has accused
Florida’s Ron DeSantis of — a botched response and dishonest numbers — is true
of Cuomo.
The Lincoln Project, the great conquering super PAC of
the 2020 election, hailed as the work of geniuses and lavished with attention
on cable news, has imploded upon revelations that it is a sleazy scam.
And the widely circulated story of the death of Officer
Brian Sicknick, a key element of Trump’s second impeachment, is at the very
least murky and more complicated than first reported.
It’s one thing to get a story wrong under deadline
pressure; it’s quite another to get it wrong despite copious, readily available
evidence to the contrary over the course of months, which is the case with the
Cuomo and Lincoln Project stories.
All it took to realize that the heroic Cuomo narrative
didn’t add up was to look, almost from the very beginning, at any of the COVID
trackers that showed New York had one of the worst records in the country in
terms of total deaths and deaths per capita.
Amazingly enough, the myth of Cuomo continued unabated
even when the governor rescinded his nursing-home policy last May and it
was already obvious it had been a profound policy error.
Hagiography and cloying CNN interviews with his brother
remained the order of the day.
No, the spell didn’t begin to break until the New York
attorney general revealed the undercount of nursing-home deaths and the New
York Post — a publication that never bought into the Cuomo mythology and
consequently earned his bristling contempt — followed up on the seeming
cover-up.
If you formed your impression of Cuomo’s performance
based solely on the tone of his press coverage over the last year, you were
badly misled.
The press also had ample warning signs about the Lincoln
Project — the excessive production costs, the lack of transparency, the
financial difficulties of some of the principals, the ads geared to trolling
rather than persuasion in battleground states. It was easy to see as early as
last summer that
something wasn’t right.
All of this was largely ignored, in favor of fawning
coverage and cable segments — until the John Weaver scandal invited more
serious scrutiny and, with the election over, the project was no longer so
politically useful.
Once again, the best way to have gotten exactly the wrong
impression of the Lincoln Project would have been to read and view its press
coverage, which managed to avoid what was most interesting and important about
the Lincoln Project — namely, it was a grift run by people who issued ringing
denunciations of grifting.
Finally, there’s the case of Officer Sicknick. Here the
issue in the first instance was deadline reporting. The New York Times
ran stories in the immediate aftermath of his tragic death saying that he was
killed by rioters.
Even though this is now in doubt, there hasn’t been much
additional reporting in the mainstream press about a case at the center of a
highly scrutinized, politically fraught episode. And so the initial, dubious
reporting is still widely accepted, and may always be.
It’s no wonder that some people conclude that because the
media are saying it, it must be false, and seek out alternate sources of
information that are even less factual and more misleading than the mainstream
press.
This is a problem that doesn’t have a ready solution, but
it’d be helpful if the media recognized their contribution to the downward
spiral.
Instead, they’re constantly onto the next politically
convenient narrative, always presented with the same certainty and expectation
that all right-thinking people must share it, no matter how flimsy or
unfounded.
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