February 28, 2020

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH

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On February 28, the World Health Organization raised the Coronavirus to its highest threat level, warning that every country should make prevention and treatment an immediate priority. Many countries, such Japan, are closing schools and discouraging large group gatherings.

The primary and most notable exception is the United States, where we have a con man in the White House more concerned that implementing a public health emergency will force the continued plunge of the stock market and jeopardize his re-election chances than with the lives of Americans.

Even before the Coronavirus outbreak, Trump had reduced CDC allocations and eliminated funding for widely praised pandemic preventive and protocol programs created by Obama and Bush. Now, that the Coronavirus is a global concern, Trump is employing his strategy of diversion, supplemented by his rank incompetence.

He has blamed concern over the virus on his “enemies,” particularly the Democrats. He has also dismissed the virus as something that will disappear like a “miracle.” He’s muzzled the experts at the CDC, NIH, including the renowned government expert on infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases). Instead, he appointed Mike Pence, who caused an unnecessary HIV epidemic when he was governor of Indiana because of his fundamentalist religious beliefs, to be in charge of the Coronavirus “planning,” as well as designating Pence to be the sole spokesperson concerning Coronavirus. This is dangerous, because normally the medical experts would be implementing urgent prevention measures and advising the public on how to avoid transmission.

Instead, Pence was seen engaging in two activities following the first news conference on the Coronavirus that public health officials are warning against, wiping his nose and then shaking hands.

"Pence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials,” according to a February 27 NYT headline. This is like the Soviet-Union where disinformation was handled through state-designated and vetted propagandists. We are facing a pandemic, and all we will get is self-serving Trump lies.

In short, Trump is treating the Coronavirus as he has handled all his political chicanery, through duplicity, diversion and disinformation. The result could be deadly.

For the most part, the media reported Trump’s initial Coronavirus news conference this week as though Trump were to be taken seriously in taking charge of a potentially deadly and rapidly spreading contagion.

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch headlined his news conference coverage article, “Big media is covering up Trump’s terrifying incoherence in a time of emergency”:

Wednesday’s briefing was arguably the most abnormal moment yet in a profoundly abnormal presidency.

But top news organizations, rather than accurately representing Trump’s alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all.

They made it sound like some real news was made: That Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus; that the president urged calm.

But even the Pence “news” appears to be a sham, and a clusterfuck: In addition to being basically a fuck-you to the medical community — given Pence’s proud defiance of scientific truths — it was apparently a last-minute decision based on political optics that blindsided Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who at the same time insisted that he was still in charge.

Froomkin who is a frequent critic of the corporate media was beside himself that reporters from such media outlets as The New York Times and The Washington Post more or less just transcribed Trump’s incoherent and uninformed comments on the virus, as though the complete con was actually authoritative and helpful to the nation. Indeed, it was just the opposite; it was Trump’s fruitless attempt to calm the markets to help bolster his re-election chances.

A tweet by CNN’s Marshall Cohen was one of the breakaway media insights into the perilous conspiracy theories being peddled by Trump and his media shills that endanger everyone in the United States.

No longer can one mock the derangement of Trump and his cult. Their anti-science and political weaponization are threatening the health and lives of all of us. This is a power that must be legally seized from Trump and Pence, but how?

In 1918, an outbreak of the Spanish flu “infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet's population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans.”

That is the risk we take when so many in the media, and there are growing exceptions especially on Cable TV, function as well-paid stenographers for Trump’s toxic self-serving propaganda that exacerbates the likelihood of the Coronavirus spreading in the US. Indeed, it is telling that the highly contagious Coronavirus will not be halted by Trump’s politically-calculated Border Wall. With the arrival of the Coronavirus, the ringmaster and master of bullshit has met his match. But, alas, we will be the collateral damage.

It's time to lay out the proposition that corporate media is more beholden to the profits of parent corporations, which benefit from GOP tax cuts, conservative advertisers, and whose board members are wealthy, than to the truth. The Trump masquerade can only succeed with media enabling.

With Trump’s acquittal after a rigged-impeachment “trial,” there appears no one who can save us from his evil. That is a devastating thought as the number of Coronavirus cases rises around the world every day.

We can only hope that more of the media will feel their own lives are at risk and expose the shabby and grave disinformation, ignorance, ineptitude and lies that Trump is peddling for political reasons.

This nation’s public health is being held hostage by a Qanon cult and its “fearless leader,” who has as much credibility as Kim Jong Un, Trump’s friend and dictator.

In the end, as the virus kicks in, we will get from Pence and Trump what the Republicans offer as a solution to gun massacres: prayer. Science and disease, however, are impervious to Pence on his knees with his head bowed and hands joined. We saw what results that had in Indiana, and it gives us every reason to fear for the worst.

Trump’s willfully obstructing what science requires to best protect the US population, in its potential for a devastating lethal impact, is akin to a war crime.

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