Media’s breathless hysteria over Donald Trump’s Covid diagnosis

US President Donald Trump, right, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden take part in the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio. Picture: AFP

One of the most perceptive criticisms of Donald Trump’s performance in the first presidential debate came within minutes of the conclusion of the event in Cleveland. News Corp’s Miranda Devine, who writes for The Daily Telegraph while covering the presidential election year for The New York Post, joined me on Sky News to review the fiery contest.

“I felt during it that I wish that President Trump would just let Joe Biden talk and hang himself because we know how mixed up he gets without a teleprompter and he loses his train of thought,” she said. “Donald Trump interrupting him all the time was getting him off the hook.”

US President Trump waves from the back of a car in a motorcade outside of Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Picture: AFP

The “enough rope” theory — which provided an inspired title for the one-time Andrew Denton talk show — is a good one. At one stage Biden was getting into a spirited defence of the Green New Deal before moderator Chris Wallace saved him by asking if he supported it: “No, I don’t support the Green New Deal,” Biden remembered, live on global television.

The hypocrisy and duplicity of the US media’s coverage of the debate can be exposed in just two tweets by CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. He has made a name for himself as an anti-Trump protagonist and personifies the mainstream media’s antipathy towards the President.

During the debate, Trump was asked for the umpteenth time to denounce white supremacists to which he replied “sure”, and “I will do it”, before being asked to denounce the “Proud Boys” group who he said should “stand back and stand by.” Instead of welcoming or moving on from this, the media pretended this was a refusal to denounce, or even a call for white supremacists to remain on “stand by”.

This is what we call fake news and what we have all become used to over the past four years or so. The President had denounced these groups repeatedly over the years as the media has continued to smear him with links to their activities.

Asked about this by Sean Hannity on Fox News two days after the debate, Trump said: “I have said it many times, and let me be clear again, I condemn the KKK, I condemn all white supremacists, I condemn the Proud Boys — I don’t know much about the Proud Boys, almost nothing — but I condemn that.” He went on again to call for Biden to denounce Antifa, which the Democrat candidate has failed to do, and which the media tend not to pursue him on.

Anyway, Acosta then took to Twitter. “Trump has finally condemned white supremacists … on Hannity.”

Trump has finally condemned white supremacists... on Hannity.

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) October 2, 2020

Yet a quick search of Acosta’s Twitter feed turns up this, from August 15, 2017, more than three years earlier: “Trump condemns KKK and white supremacists commenting on Charlottesville: ‘Racism is evil.’ ”

Trump condemns KKK and white supremacists commenting on Charlottesville: "Racism is evil."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 14, 2017

With four weeks until the election, we can expect Trump to “finally” condemn extremism a few more times yet.

The President’s coronavirus infection has exposed the differing political and media interpretations of the pandemic which will tend to support his arguments, providing his health does not suffer severely — a major uncertainty, given his age puts him in the vulnerable bracket. Trump has long been criticised for being anti-alarmist and trying to maintain perspective about a virus that is asymptomatic or mild for the overwhelming majority of people infected, while it presents a serious threat to life for people who are both elderly and suffering co-morbidities.

This has always clashed with the media’s natural bent towards catastrophism and this contrast was highlighted when he tested positive. On CNN, host Don Lemon talked about the President’s diagnosis confirming people’s “worst fears”, while it was a “code red moment” according to the network’s national security correspondent Samantha Vinograd.

“This may be the most dangerous moment that the US government has ever faced,” said Vinograd, with a stern and straight face. “The President is suffering from a deadly virus. This feels like something we should be watching on an episode of Homeland.” (Popular culture references like this, I might add, seem to be the dumbest form of public commentary — sometimes you hear journalists describe scenes of real disaster by comparing them to movie scenes faked to look like real disasters.)

Anyway, Vinograd’s hyperbole continued. “The President of the United States is suffering from a deadly virus, he has to quarantine, he is not able to fully perform his duties as commander-in-chief. Based upon the number of personnel that he comes into contact with every single day without wearing a mask, it is logical that other senior personnel within the national security apparatus could be infected by this virus. At a minimum they will also be unable to fully perform their duties. The US government is incredibly vulnerable at this moment. We do not have a full team on deck and that means that there are major gaps in our national security coverage based on this diagnosis.”

That is a rather breathless analysis. Having endured wars against the British, Spanish, French and Mexicans, as well as the Civil War, two World Wars and a long series of other wars, stand-offs and natural disasters along the way, and having seen four presidents assassinated, with attempted assassinations of others, I would have thought American governments just might have faced more dangerous moments.

Another way to report this might have been to say that the President has picked up a virus that is running rampant throughout the US and which leads to only mild illness in the vast majority of people infected. Even in his vulnerable age group — Trump is 74 — only 116 out of every 1000 people known to be infected die as a result (according to Nature magazine), and the US Centre for Disease Control statistics show that people in their 70s, who are known to be infected, have a 95 per cent chance of survival. This obviously excludes those who never know about their infection, and ignores heavier concentrations of those fatalities in people with co-morbidities.

It is a forlorn plea, I know, but the media ought to calm down. I wonder if they realise how well their hyperventilation will play out for Trump when transposed against the phlegmatic approach exemplified in his hospital video released on the weekend. In a campaign when there has been much debate about the US constitution, much more for now will hinge on Trump’s constitution.

As for the journalists and others talking karma and wishing the worst against Trump on Twitter, I don’t think we need to waste any time or space on them. Suffice to say Twitter is a sewer and we would all be better off without it.

However, I would like to add one pandemic-related footnote. For years I have claimed (and, to my mind, demonstrated) that, en masse, the national broadcaster is badly out of touch with mainstream concerns. For anyone who has ever doubted this, I offer the following conclusive evidence.

At a time when the nation is wracked by the economic consequences of the pandemic response, with businesses closed, millions out of work or relying on welfare to keep them on the books, with state and federal public servants accepting wage freezes to share the economic burden, and with journalists and others in commercial media losing their jobs or taking pay cuts as the pandemic accentuates structural pressures, ABC staff were asked to delay their 2 per cent pay rise by six months.

They voted four-to-one in favour of taking the money, thumbing their noses at the people they serve and who pay their wages. Why ever not? It is, after all, their ABC.