Five major American newspapers -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times -- have largely ignored President Donald Trump’s firing of “the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command” in 2018 in their print coverage of his administration’s response to the novel coronavirus outbreak over the past two weeks.
Following the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Obama administration “set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group” at the Department of Homeland Security and another at the National Security Council to coordinate policies among key federal agencies and respond to potential global pandemics. But as Foreign Policy explained, Trump got rid of them:
NBC News reported that pandemic experts and past officials who oversaw responses to disease outbreaks say Trump’s staff cuts are “likely to hamper the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus.” But Americans who read print copies of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times would not have been sufficiently informed about this aspect of how Trump has weakened America’s defenses to coronavirus.
Media Matters reviewed print articles from those newspapers over the past two weeks for mentions of the Trump administration’s response to the outbreak of novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19. Of 38 articles, only eight -- or 21% -- mentioned the lack of a pandemic response team in the NSC/DHS: Four in The New York Times, two in The Washington Post, and two in the Los Angeles Times. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today made no mention of Trump’s firings.
And some of those mentions about the missing pandemic response teams failed to specifically explain that the Trump administration had fired them.
Right-wing media have lied for years about the American health care system, downplaying the fact that millions of people are either uninsured or lack access to affordable health care.
With a possible pandemic on the horizon, that’s a real problem.
A perfect example of this problem is evident in the Miami Herald’s reporting about Osmel Martinez Azcue. After visiting China, he felt sick. Taking the advice of experts, he went to the hospital, where it turned out that he did not have the novel coronavirus strain known as COVID-19, but rather the common flu. He was then billed $3,270, but he may only have to pay $1,400 for the tests he was given if he can prove to his insurance company that the flu he contracted was not related to a preexisting condition. The Herald noted that so-called “junk plans” that don’t actually cover common medical expenses contribute to this problem, writing that “often the plans aren’t very different from going without insurance altogether.”
This is completely absurd. As the Los Angeles Times’ Matt Pearce noted, people in other countries don’t pay anything near this amount for a coronavirus test.
Right-wing media have defended this ridiculous system for years, fearmongering about proposals that would improve health care quality. People on Fox News are totally fine with rising rates of the uninsured in the U.S. They demand that undocumented immigrants be denied access to health care. Right-wing pundits embrace junk plans and argue loudly that such plans should be allowed to be sold across state lines.
In short: Right-wing media assume that there will never be a health crisis that requires the public to actually get treatment. But this system has always been vulnerable to an actual crisis.
Authoritarian countries like Iran and China are having problems for similar reasons, as Zeynep Tufekci wrote, because of “authoritarian blindness.” By privileging lies, authoritarian leaders are often blind to developing problems.
Right-wing media have long privileged lies about the American health care system, and now we have a president who believes those lies.
Look at Dr. Nancy Messonnier. Trump is reportedly furious at the CDC official for telling the truth about coronavirus eventually impacting the United States.
Or look at Rush Limbaugh. Not only did he downplay the virus and claim it was being weaponized by the media in an effort to bring down Trump, but he’s also now saying that Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party pose “a much greater threat to this country than the coronavirus does.”
Guaranteeing that everyone in the country has reliable access to health care is not some fringe or radical notion. Limbaugh and his ilk can scream about Venezuela all they want, but from Canada to the U.K. to elsewhere in the world, developed countries have found ways to ensure their residents have basic access to health care, which comes in handy when there is a potential pandemic.
Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) have built their campaigns around the idea of ensuring that every American has high-quality health care. And instead of showing empathy or understanding why Medicare for All is so popular with the public, we have pundits scratching their heads and appearing wildly confused.
The Trump administration can’t even promise that a coronavirus vaccine would be affordable for everyone: