Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵THREAD🧵

Blue states across the country are finally allowing kids to go to school without masks.

You may remember, a few short months ago, Florida was demonized for allowing the same.

Who’s up for a little side-by-side? And where does @GovRonDeSantis go for his apology? ⤵️

You may remember that, when DeSantis banned mandates, @CNN put together a heart-wrenching story about how even 12 year old kids knew that masks were necessary in schools.

But when it isn’t Florida allowing kids to be unmasked, we just get the facts.

Why the change?

Over at @CNNPolitics, the same agitprop story got recycled in Florida.

But now? We’re told “Democratic governors outpace the White House with masking pullbacks.”

Oddly, I don’t recall the term “outpace” being used about DeSantis.

We saw the same thing out of @CBSNews. When it was Florida allowing kids to go to school unmasked, we had viral letters urging mandates.

But now? Apparently these things no longer go viral.

Sidebar: using kids as props for your preferred political narrative is awful, esp when your narrative isn’t supported by the facts.

There have been a total of 67 kids 17 & under who have died w/ Covid in FL, ~1% of all lives lost under 18.

Remember that as you see the coverage.

Anyway, back to the media.

Are we not going to have a round of outraged doctors on to talk about what “science says” this time, @CBSNews?

Is it saying something differently now? Or is it merely silent as these new mandates fall?

Again. Where are the feature stories on distraught children who are no longer going to be forced to wear masks in these states, @TODAYshow?

@MSNBC quoted @DavidJollyFL to suggest that, without governors acting like DeSantis, “we could end this pandemic.” Quite the claim!

But when New Jersey dropped their mandate, it’s just a supportive quote from the governor about why it made sense.

Perhaps my favorite about-face was from @BusinessInsider, who ran a piece about how 3 teachers in Florida died from Covid *during their summer vacation* as a scare story but now it’s Biden who’s in the wrong for “getting left behind by his own party” as blue states lift mandates.

In a common practice, @washingtonpost focused on the perspective of critics when it came to masking in Florida.

In other states where kids can now attend without masks, we’re just given the straight information that mandates are “falling.”

And we saw the same thing from @nytimes.

In Florida, the story is about the angry school boards. Not so when “several Democratic governors” end mandates - then it’s all about the good reasons they’ve offered for their decisions.

I want to pause here to address a criticism I’ll surely get.

Yes, Florida banned mandates in schools, whereas in these other states the existing mask mandates have been ended or allowed to expire.

But in terms of the coverage, this difference is semantic.

The criticism of DeSantis (predominantly) wasn’t that he’d overstepped his authority; it was that he was going to get kids killed b/c schools won’t require masks.

Take @PressSec. Her worry about a world where “there were not masks in elementary school” is curiously absent now.

That variety of concern bled over into the media. Just take a look at @joyannreid.

When it was DeSantis, Reid was “in horrified disbelief that any Florida governor would condemn his own state’s citizens to sickness and death.”

That concern is absent when the good guys do it.⤵️

Or look at the difference in the way that @kylegriffin1 framed this.

In Florida, he made it sound as if teaching in person was so life-threatening that teachers needed to draft wills.

For Democratic states? Again: just the facts.

And throughout all this, it was never just DeSantis. @MSNBC worked themselves into a hysteria about @GovernorVA doing something similar merely two weeks ago.

But when blue New Jersey does away with masks? Oddly, the anger is absent.

(@kylegriffin1 did this, too, for Arizona. Interesting how the fact that the blue state governors “ignored CDC recommendations” is curiously absent, unlike in Arizona. And of course, Kyle wasn’t alone in this.)

But back to DeSantis.

@ABC treated schools in Florida as if they were Berlin during the US airlift when DeSantis banned mask mandates.

Now the story is far simpler: states change rules. That’s it.

@NPR took a break from their round-the-clock coverage of how innocuous things are racist to raise the alarm about the number of new Covid cases in Floria (in a district that still required masks!).

Think we’ll get that breathless coverage in these other states? I doubt it.

@therecountput together a full timetable of “the pandemic problem child” Florida’s decision making around masks and schools.

But over in New Jersey, the state with the third-most deaths per capita (a full 15 spots ahead of Florida” instead it’s just “mandate no more.”

In Florida, the story from @thedailybeast was that the state had “just found a way to be even more COVID reckless “

But in blue states? Well, they haven’t even covered the lifting of their mandates. Maybe because they’re spending their time watching Fox talk about them instead.

I try to talk a lot about framing, and how it can (and is) used by outlets to give their readers a clear indication who they ought to believe are the good guys & the bad guys based on which voices are elevated in coverage.

This, in my view, has been a pretty egregious example.

So, I ask again, where does @GovRonDeSantis go for his apology?

Beyond just weaponizing the coverage to take shots at a pol the media doesn’t like, this type of breathless reporting skews perceptions about the risk of Covid for kids.

We’ve long known that risk is quite small: less than from the seasonal flu, much lower than for other populations.

This piece from July by @dwallacewells in @NYMag does a great job explaining how school mitigation efforts aren’t aligned w/ the real risk. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

And as I’ve said before, it’s good that these states are making wiser choices than they were.

But it sure does do a good job of revealing the hypocrisy with which much of the corporate press has treated the issue of kids and Covid throughout the pandemic.

And as I’ve mentioned before, these threads have always been yeoman’s work I do in my spare time. But if you use the Twitter mobile app and want to kick me some beer money (or beer crypto) for the effort, you can click on this button in my profile.

And for those who’ve asked, if you don’t use the mobile app, I’m on Venmo at Drew-Holden-1 and on Strike (for Bitcoin) at drewholden360.