ABC swings and misses with anti-Trump hit piece
If you want to know why COVID-19 is so bad in the US, don’t bother with Aunty’s three-week-old hit piece, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- New mobile phone data points to Wuhan lab accident in October
- Good plan, PM, shame about the premiers
America-bashing has long been a cheap thrill at the ABC, but ever since the election of Donald Trump and now, the onset of coronavirus, it has become something closer to an addiction.
Donald Trump, the ABC and its commentators never fail to tell us, is the mortal enemy of science and reason.
And what’s worse, his blustering, oafish presidency is the reason why the United States has (assuming you are gullible enough to trust China’s figures and don’t work things out on a per capita basis) suffered the highest number of deaths from COVID-19 in the world.
We get it. They don’t like the guy.
And while they don’t have to, you would think that as our national broadcaster they would at least have an obligation to be fair to him.
Or not, as the case may be.
Monday night’s episode of Four Corners was a perfect example of this obsession.
Not a local production, the episode was instead an off-the-shelf episode of the American Public Broadcasting Service’s “Frontline” which had aired three weeks ago in the States – and which purported to “(trace) the halting federal response, identifying early warnings and missed opportunities to potentially save lives as the outbreak spread”.
Filled with more “here’s how you should feel” background music than an episode of MasterChef, the episode was not so much an exercise in investigative journalism as a drive-by, with a host of Democratic governors and politicians given the chance to unload on the president.
“We sort of knew that he had an intent of downplaying what was an emerging problem. That, you know, could only be explained by someone who had their eye on the Dow Jones rather than an eye on the epidemiological curve”, Washington Governor Jay Inslee told the program.
Democrat Senator Patty Murray, also from Washington State where America’s first coronavirus patient was detected, said: “Obviously, an infectious disease like this could spread rapidly, and no one in Washington, D.C., was treating it that way. I felt like at the time, I lived in two different worlds.”
A former Obama administration official intoned, “We’re dependent on sewing circles to supply our frontline heroes with what they need. It may be a nice American story. I find it pathetic.”
And on and on it went.
But while there were some fair shots taken – particularly around backlogs in getting coronavirus test kits approved by the federal government, in buying a dusty, three-week-old program aimed at an American audience, the ABC did its viewers a major disservice at a time when clarity, rather than ideology, is needed.
The same people who complain about this never mention, say, the Trump administration’s invocation of the Defence Production Act to order the manufacture of ventilators.
And since the program was aired, for example, a number of facts have come to light about the spread of coronavirus in the US which point not to the White House, but New York City.
Of the US’s 1.38 million confirmed coronavirus cases, the largest number by far come from New York State – with 335,000 and counting, and an astronomical 185,000 of them from New York City alone.
Even the New York Times, no friend of Trump, conceded that even if the virus kicked off on the West Coast, once it incubated in the petri dish of the five boroughs it was travellers from the city who were the primary sources of infection for victims across the country.
And looking at a state by state map of infections and death, one quickly realises that most of the US has been lightly touched by the disease, while New York – and particularly the New York City area – has been a true disaster zone. Once one understands that, some of the protests against draconian lockdown laws in less densely populated parts of the country become more understandable.
Echoing the legitimate complaints heard in regional Australia, many ask why thinly-populated small towns in America should be subject to the same rules as big cities where people live and work and travel virtually on top of one another?
It gets worse, though again ABC viewers are not likely to hear much about it.
While the documentary didn’t speak to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, it might have also been worth mentioning the thousands of deaths in nursing homes which Cuomo forced by executive order to take COVID-19 patients – while the US Navy’s hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, and a field hospital set up at a major convention centre, sat mostly empty.
This was the same Cuomo who didn’t order New York City subways – thought to be a major vector for the virus – to be disinfected until April 30, and has even lately taken to referring to COVID-19, which indisputably originated in Wuhan, China, as a “European virus”.
Given the scale of devastation that New York has caused to the rest of US, perhaps we ought to nickname it the Big Apple virus instead.
And given all this, perhaps the ABC would be better using its taxpayer largesse to actually investigate the issue – rather than buy one-sided hit pieces from their counterparts abroad