Media fears things are getting better

Heather MacDonald:

Fear is gripping the American public health and media establishments: they are losing control. States are belatedly (and far too tentatively) easing their coronavirus lockdowns, many without having met the absurd CDC benchmarks for doing so. Customers are joyfully returning to previously shuttered restaurants and parks, some even discarding that symbol of subjugation: the outdoor mask.

The mainstream media and health experts are not going down without a fight, however; their newfound power over almost the entirety of human life has been too exhilarating to give up now. Their reaction to the current rebellion provides a glimpse of the strategies that will be deployed during the much-hyped ‘second wave’ of infections this fall in order to shut the economy down again.

The extent of media panic became clear in mid-May. On May 15, CNN checked back in to Georgia, that blackguard state that had started reopening in April without expert pre-clearance, drawing a rebuke even from President Donald Trump. On April 21, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that Georgia governor Brian Kemp was seeking to ‘turn his state into the place to die.’

Three weeks later, things were not looking good for the proponents of indefinite shutdown. ‘Since reopening late last month,’ CNN glumly reported, ‘Georgia hasn’t seen a spike in coronavirus cases.’ Time to change the standards for success: ‘But there also hasn’t been a significant decrease in new case counts,’ the cable channel added. New case counts had decreased — 6 percent over a week — but the drop just wasn’t ‘significant,’ by CNN’s lights. Moreover, CNN pointed out, that downward trend was ‘unsteadily downward,’ as if any set of data does not have daily fluctuations.

Case counts are influenced by rates of testing, but CNN did not suggest that Georgia had been testing less since reopening. Nevertheless, under this new standard of ‘significant’ and unbroken case count decline, Georgia’s reopening had to be seen as a failure.

The next day, MSNBC addressed the national decline in new cases. The trend was ‘downwards,’ an on-air host admitted, but the ‘numbers were still horrible.’ That MSNBC would define any numbers as ‘horrible’ was a foregone conclusion; the issue is where those numbers are heading. In light of that downward trend, it was time to trot out what was then the media’s favorite doomsday prediction. The US is facing the ‘darkest winter in modern history,’ the MSNBC host reminded viewers, quoting the former director of a federal biomedical research agency, who had testified at a House subcommittee hearing two days earlier.

On May 17, the New York Times crushed its competition with the most audacious effort yet to turn good news into bad. ‘NEW CASES IN US SLOW, POSING RISK OF COMPLACENCY,’ read the lead headline in the print edition. Sub headlines further limned the gloomy picture: ‘TRAJECTORY UNCERTAIN,’ ‘Spikes Feared As the Very Steps That Curbed the Virus Are Lifted.’ Do not stop being fearful, in other words. While the virus risk may go down, complacency risk replaces it, leaving us as threatened as before. The only proper posture is to shelter in place permanently.
...

There is more.

The media is just too invested in doom and gloom and making things worse by pooh pooing encouraging news.  If you want to make things better and put them in their place, ignore them.