The Wuhan coronavirus is perhaps the worst example of "narrative journalism" to date, especially since the media's preferred narratives track so closely with the political goals of the Chinese Communist Party.
The CCP's first objective was to prevent domestic panic and political unrest from becoming a threat to its power. Global media obligingly ran with a narrative that draconian measures taken by the Chinese government swiftly brought the virus under control.
Next the CCP needed the virus to spread rapidly beyond China's borders. Global media was suddenly humming with stories about how travel bans were irrational xenophobic evil and nothing could keep the virus from spreading around the world.
Once the virus was firmly entrenched in other countries, the CCP needed the rest of the world to go nuts with economy-killing lockdowns. The media said anyone who questioned Lockdown Forever ideology was a homicidal maniac who wanted to sacrifice Grandma for the stock market.
Much of the Western World, including most of the United States, remains in the grip of full or partial lockdown ideology, including schools. The damage to children will be generational in character. China used the virus to strike crippling blows against its global adversaries.
And now the media is running with coronavirus narratives designed to replace a U.S. president who fights against Chinese domination with one who is, shall we say, much more hospitable to the CCP's political and economic agenda.
It was the worst of narrative journalism every step of the way - inconvenient facts ignored or suppressed with astonishing ruthlessness, inconvenient questions silenced with howls of heresy, all of it built on the fantasy of controlling the spread of a virus without quarantines.
Global media narratives were easily corrupted by using false information from Communist China. Both explicitly and implicitly, coverage of the coronavirus assumes the CCP is basically telling the truth, but in reality they've lied every step of the way.
The world became obsessed with the fantasy of a large nation using lockdowns to eradicate the virus, when in reality China simply lied about how widely it spread, easily concealed the relatively small number of deaths and hospitalizations, and pretended to do loads of testing.
Leave China's corrupt information out of the mix, look only at the places where hard facts can be verified, and it looks like only small and geographically isolated areas were able to "crush" the coronavirus - and they relied heavily on traditional quarantines/travel bans.
Everyone else is left scratching their heads as the coronavirus mysteriously "resurges" in "waves" despite economy-killing lockdowns and mask mandates. The places that quarantined the healthy instead of the sick are in very bad shape when it comes to much-derided "herd immunity."
Everyone remains confused and frightened because the media underplays or suppresses information that contradicts its preferred narratives, so we're left with a seemingly unbeatable pandemic, a virus with completely irrational characteristics, a crisis that doesn't make sense.
And the metrics keep changing to support the media's narratives, so we went from focusing on mortality rates and hospitalization to obsessing over the far more protean and less meaningful metric of "cases." If we were still using the metrics from April, we'd be far less panicked.
We were stampeded away from using the methods we know are effective, and importantly COST-effective, with benefits that are not outweighed by those nasty side effects and "unintended consequences" the media doesn't want to talk about.
Quarantines, travel bans, protecting the most vulnerable populations, mitigating hospitalizations, and carrying on with our lives so we have the social and economic strength to handle the damage from the inevitable spread of a highly contagious disease - that approach works.
That approach is the ONLY thing that works in a huge country with swift and easy travel between major population centers. We were driven mad with the fantasy of emulating tiny island nations, or the false "success" claimed by a brutal, mendacious Communist dictatorship. /end
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