I have recently been reminded of a few Trumpian headlines about the coronavirus from liberal media outlets around the late January, early February period.
The Washington Post had an opinion piece with the headline "Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/heal...a15166-4444-11ea-b5fc-eefa848cde99_story.html
(Behind paywall)
The Daily Beast had a headline of "The Virus Killing US Kids Isn't the One Dominating the Headlines". Its Tweet to advertise this read "Coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat". This article seems to have been deleted.
Vox tweeted, in an effort to 'inform' its followers, as part of a larger tweet on coronavirus 'facts', "[...] Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No."
Buzzfeed has an article (still up):
Here's What We Do And Don't Know About The Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak
The current headline is "Here's What We Do And Don't Know About The Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak." There is a sort of retraction at the top, reading:
"
Update: This story was originally published with a different headline comparing the effect of the coronavirus outbreak in the US to the flu. The headline, and the story, was based on information available in late January. Because the story is still being widely shared, we have decided to change the headline in order to reflect our current understanding of the pandemic. Here is the most recent BuzzFeed News coverage on the coronavirus."
I believe that the original headline was something like "Don't worry about the coronavirus. Worry about the flu." There is still a subheading to one section of the article that reads "The risk of getting infected is high in China -- but people in the US should be way more worried about the flu."
There was also an article I read at the time on the European Euronews website titled "Which is the real pandemic, coronavirus or the hysteria that follows?" formerly available at this link:
https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/05...-hysteria-that-follows-euronews-reality-check
This has since been deleted. I believe that the author was an academic physician, but I cannot recall his name. It excoriated people in the media and the public for being needlessly concerned about the coronavirus in early February. Styled as a 'reality check', it confidently asserted that the Chinese coronavirus epidemic would not result in a global pandemic, and that there would be a peak of 70,000 or so infections before it would die out. Besides, the mortality rate is low, and those who die were going to die anyway, so why worry?
A lot of these self-same outlets are now leading the charge against the coronavirus and seemingly not viewing any measure as too harsh to contain it. It was not always so, however. I think that there is quite possibly a cognitive difficulty they struggled with, in that as long as the epidemic was largely confined to China and to a lesser extent the wider East Asian region, voicing any sort of concern about its possible spread outside of that region, and seeking to mitigate against that, would have had racist connotations. And so at that time they invested some energy in concocting Trumpian opinion pieces to downplay the pandemic potential, and to make flawed comparisons with the seasonal flu.
It was only when the virus had demonstrably established itself far beyond this region that they allowed themselves (and others) to voice concerns.
Of course, Euronews' precious EU freedom of movement and the Schengen Zone have now been effectively abolished for the time being and such drastic measures now do not look so disproportionate or extreme to EU/Schengen governments. What price have we paid in our war against "panic"?
