In 2020, then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden made some pretty sweeping promises about what he would do if elected. The most significant pledge he made was that he would “shut down the virus.”
“I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus,” Biden wrote in a tweet a month before the election. He said it so often in 2020 that I lost count.
Here’s a compilation video of just a few of the many instances where he made such a claim during his campaign:
Now here we are a year into his presidency – and in an election year, and there’s been a sudden metamorphosis in the Biden administration on “shutting down the virus.” A few weeks ago, he admitted there was “no federal solution” to getting the Wuhan coronavirus under control. Senior members of his administration, including top health advisers like Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, have also conveniently loosened guidelines surrounding CDC recommendations, admittedly based primarily on economic considerations.
Remember, the Democrats and the press branded then-President Donald Trump and his administration as “murderers” when they factored economic considerations into the pandemic response.
But with the new sheriff in town, being a Democrat means different rules for how the media operates. Predictably, the mainstream media is now changing its tune on how it reports on cases, which they say is due to the surge in Omicron variant cases nationwide:
For two years, coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations have been widely used barometers of the pandemic’s march across the world.But the omicron wave is making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.[…]Yet these [soaring case] counts only reflect what is reported by health authorities. They do not include most people who test themselves at home, or are infected without even knowing about it. Holidays and weekends also lead to lags in reported cases.If you could add all those numbers up — and you can’t — case counts would likely be substantially higher.
Because of that, the Associated Press told its reporters and editors “to avoid emphasizing case counts in stories about the disease. That means, for example, no more stories focused solely on a particular country or state setting a one-day record for number of cases, because that claim has become unreliable.”
They then went on to note how other news organizations like the New York Times were changing the way they covered case numbers as well before getting around to admitting that hospitalizations are not always the best way to gauge outbreaks:
Hospitalization and death rates are considered by some to be a more reliable picture of COVID-19′s current impact on society. Yet even the usefulness of those numbers has been called into question in recent days. In many cases, hospitalizations are incidental: there are people being admitted for other reasons and are surprised to find they test positive for COVID, said Tanya Lewis, senior editor for health and medicine at Scientific American.
Gee, ya think?
Though the AP cited an expert who wanted to emphasize that case counts should not be eliminated from coverage, that same expert said they were important to note from a “societal impact” perspective, and that such stories “may not be told adequately if only hospitalizations and deaths are emphasized.”
Hmmm. Aren’t these some of the same things conservatives have said since the pandemic started? Why the change from the media now?
The reasons why are glaringly obvious. Because not only does it help Joe Biden, it also helps Democrat governors in blue states like New York where we’re seeing record case numbers. We’re also in a critical midterm election year where a lot is on the line for the media’s preferred political party.
These two images pretty much encapsulate what’s happening between the Biden administration’s shift in how they talk about surges and the media falling in line accordingly as they did for Biden in 2020. They also did this after White House officials conferred with media outlets last month on how to better spin gloomy reports on the economy more in the White House’s favor:
Bottom line: The goal here is to reframe Joe Biden’s presidency to make it look like he’s done what he promised he would do:
‘Nuff said.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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