The top 5 worst media moments of 2020
Another banner year.
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It was another shameful year for the establishment press.
In 2020, the year of the coronavirus pandemic and the defeat of President Trump in an exceptionally contentious election, mainstream newsrooms repeatedly got the story wrong. For the sake of brevity, however, we can narrow the news industry’s failures last year to its top five worst moments.
So, in no particular order, here are the sloppiest, most erroneous, and dishonest media-driven narratives of 2020:
5. COVID-19 is no big deal
Few claims in 2020 aged as poorly as the one that said fears over COVID-19 were overblown.
“Is this going to be a deadly pandemic?” Vox asked on Jan. 31. “No.”
The Associated Press published a report elsewhere that declared, “Is the new virus more ‘deadly’ than flu? Not exactly.”
Former-Fox Business news anchor Trish Regan, meanwhile, told her viewers that the viral outbreak was being blown out of proportion and that it was just “another attempt” by Democrats “to impeach the president.”
An estimated 351,277 Americans and counting have died so far from the virus.
4. China has this virus beat, according to China
Members of the free press jumped at the chance in 2020 to parrot Chinese state officials who alleged, without any convincing evidence, that the country responsible for the coronavirus had everything under control. No one had any reason to trust China, given its well-established record of lying and its attempts to suppress the sharing of relevant information, including arresting and punishing medical professionals who tried to warn people that there was something going around with SARS-like symptoms. There was even less reason to believe China, given its downright unbelievable infections and fatalities figures. Yet, Western journalists were all too happy anyway to mimic the Chinese Communist Party’s data uncritically.
“How uncomfortable is it,” asked NBC News’s Chuck Todd, “that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?”
“Its Coronavirus Cases Dwindling, China Turns Focus Outward,” claimed the New York Times.
CNN even ran a story this year copying, almost word-for-word a Chinese Communist Party press release praising the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s efforts to contain the coronavirus. The CNN report also made it a point to criticize the U.S. Navy’s failures to do likewise.
And this is to say nothing of the Western journalists who reported in March that the United States had more known COVID-19 cases than any country in the world, ignoring all the while that China was clearly lying about its coronavirus totals.
3. “Mostly peaceful” riots
As riots spread last year from Los Angeles to New York City, razing entire communities, members of the press assured viewers against backdrops of burning buildings and smashed-in storefronts that the “protests” were “mostly peaceful.”
The “protests” were not “mostly peaceful,” as the estimated $1 billion-plus in damages, the most expensive in insurance history, can attest.
Yet viewers were treated anyway in 2020 to on-air headlines such as the one CNN ran on Aug. 27 that read, “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”
ABC News claimed earlier in an alert that read, “Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station, and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified.”
Individual journalists in New York City, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere also sought to downplay the destruction visited upon their cities by boasting that there had been no violence in their respective neighborhoods and parks. The Associated Press ran damage control for rioters “caught up in the moment.” The Washington Post even published a rioter fashion spread (it’s exactly what it sounds like).
2. Vaccines will not be ready until at least the summer of 2021
Newsrooms were maybe a little too eager to assert that a coronavirus vaccine would not be available until at least the summer of 2021. They were wrong, obviously, while Trump, who promised during the election that a vaccine would likely be available before the end of the year, was right.
But newsrooms were convinced otherwise.
“Trump appears to be expediting the vaccine development process, misrepresenting how fast a vaccine will be available to the public in fighting the novel coronavirus,” the Washington Post reported.
NBC News published a fact-check later challenging the president’s promises, citing “experts” who said, “he needs a 'miracle' to be right.”
"[J]ust one of the five — Pfizer — has said that it could have initial results this month,” the New York Times claimed in a fact-check that awarded Vice President Mike Pence a “misleading” rating after he claimed during a debate that a vaccine would likely be ready for widespread distribution by the end of the year, “and the Food and Drug Administration this week published guidelines for evaluating emergency authorizations that detailed why it could take at least several more months for a company to clear the bar."
As of this writing, healthcare workers have administered an estimated 4.33 million doses.
1. Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation
President-elect Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, announced in December that he is under federal investigation. Prosecutors in Delaware, the IRS Criminal Investigation agency, and the FBI are investigating possible tax and money laundering violations regarding Hunter Biden’s business ties to China.
Details of the federal probe first surfaced in October, however, when the New York Post published a series of reports investigating whether Hunter Biden had leveraged his father’s political influence to line the family’s pockets. The New York Post’s coverage revealed the existence of a laptop that reportedly belonged to the president-elect’s son and had since been turned over to the FBI. The laptop’s contents, which were obtained by the New York Post via Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, include an FBI document marked with “the code associated with an ongoing federal money-laundering investigation in Delaware,” according to the Daily Beast.
“Another document — one with a grand jury subpoena number — appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office,” the report adds.
Evidence of the federal investigation was out in the open following the New York Post's publication of the laptop’s contents. It was right there for establishment newsrooms to investigate. Major media organizations could have gotten the scoop about the federal investigation rather than wait on Hunter Biden and his father’s campaign to confirm its existence. But the corporate press didn’t investigate the laptop or its alleged contents. Instead, they asserted, without a shred of evidence, that the laptop story was an insidious plot by the Russians.
“Trump said to be warned that Giuliani was conveying Russian disinformation,” reported the New York Times.
Said Politico, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
“Trump embraces reported Russian anti-Biden disinfo campaign,” claimed MSNBC.
We know now that there is indeed a federal investigation into possibly illegal overseas business activities by Hunter Biden. We also know now that the Justice Department has been investigating said activities since 2018. And we know all of this only because Hunter Biden himself confirmed publicly that he is under investigation, not because of any effort by the New York Times or Politico. Those groups were content to ignore the story as Russian propaganda.
Again, it was an embarrassing year for the press.
In a way, it's fitting that news coverage in the Trump era should end as poorly as it began, back when journalists misreported everything from the disappearance of a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office to mass resignations at the State Department.