Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion – By Jeremy W. Peters (The New York Times) / April 2 2020
On Feb. 27, two days after the first reported case of the coronavirus spreading inside a community in the United States, Candace Owens was underwhelmed. “Now we’re all going to die from Coronavirus,” she wrote sarcastically to her 2 million Twitter followers, blaming a “doomsday cult” of liberal paranoia for the growing anxiety over the outbreak.
One month later, on the day the United States reached the grim milestone of having more documented coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world, Owens — a conservative commentator whom President Donald Trump has called “a real star” — was back at it, offering what she said was “a little perspective” on the 1,000 American deaths so far. “The 2009 swine flu infected 1.4 Billion people around the world, and killed 575,000 people,” she wrote. “There was no media panic, and societies did not shut down.”
In the weeks leading up to the escalation of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, tens of millions of Americans who get their information from media personalities like Owens heard that this once-in-a-lifetime global health crisis was actually downright ordinary.
The president’s backers sometimes seemed to take their cues from him. On Feb. 26, the day before Owens was a guest at the White House for an African American History Month reception, Trump denied it would spread further. “I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he said.
At other times, the president echoed right-wing media stars. When he declared at a campaign rally two days later that criticism of his halting response was a “new hoax,” commentators like Laura Ingraham of Fox News had already been accusing his opponents of exploiting the crisis. “A coronavirus,” she said on Feb. 25, “that’s a new pathway for hitting President Trump.” And when he falsely asserted that he had treated the outbreak as a pandemic all along, Fox hosts like Sean Hannity backed him up, saying that Trump’s decision to restrict travel from China and Europe would “go down as the single most consequential decision in history.”
A review of hundreds of hours of programming and social media traffic from Jan. 1 through mid-March — when the White House started urging people to stay home and limit their exposure to others — shows that doubt, cynicism and misinformation about the virus took root among many of Trump’s boosters in the right-wing media as the number of confirmed cases in the United States grew.
It was during this lull — before the human and economic toll became undeniable — when the story of the coronavirus among the president’s most stalwart defenders evolved into the kind of us-versus-them clash that Trump has waged for much of his life.
Now, with the nation’s economic and physical health in clear peril, Trump and many of his allies on the airwaves and online are blaming familiar enemies in the Democratic Party and the news media.
The pervasiveness of the denial among many of Trump’s followers from early in the outbreak, and their sharp pivot to finding fault with an old foe once the crisis deepened, is a pattern that one expert in the spread of misinformation said resembled a textbook propaganda campaign.
Continue to article: https://www.yahoo.com/news/alarm-denial-blame-pro-trump-185114338.html
