Under former President Donald Trump, the establishment media treated every COVID-19 case as an indictment of his administration.
Now that Democratic President Joe Biden is in office, many outlets have changed the way they cover the virus — downplaying news for which Trump would have been excoriated.
According to Politico, the United States set a new single-day record for COVID-19 cases with 441,278 on Tuesday. This was almost 150,000 more than the single-day record under Trump, which was 294,015.
To be clear, the omicron variant of the virus appears to be more contagious but less life-threatening. This means that while cases are going up, deaths and remaining relatively low, which is a good thing.
While the rising case numbers are not necessarily a reason to panic, the media would certainly have treated them as such if Trump were still in charge.
For evidence, let’s review two articles from the left-leaning U.K. outlet The Guardian.
On Nov. 14, 2020, the U.S. recorded 184,514 new cases, which was a record at the time. In its article reporting the numbers, The Guardian made no bones about the person it held responsible.
“US sees record 184,000 new daily Covid cases as Trump politicises vaccine effort,” the headline read.
In the very first paragraph, The Guardian accused Trump of threatening to leave New York out of his vaccine distribution plan for “political reasons.”
First of all, this claim was not entirely true. According to CNBC, the reason Trump mentioned not sending the vaccine to New York was that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo suggested he may force the vaccines to sit in waiting until he decided to approve them.
Trump said Cuomo “will have to let us know when he’s ready for it because otherwise, we can’t be delivering it to a state that won’t be giving it to its people immediately,” CNBC reported.
Second, aside from The Guardian’s dishonest characterization of Trump’s words, it made clear throughout the article that it blamed Trump and his administration for the rising case numbers.
Compare that with Wednesday’s article from The Guardian, which was headlined, “US sets record for new daily Covid cases amid Omicron surge.”
In this case, the implication was that the omicron variant was the cause of the cases, and the article did not even mention Biden until the 10th paragraph.
When it did, it painted him in a positive light, saying that “the Biden administration has placed its emphasis on greater access to testing and in promoting booster shots to the vaccinated and convincing millions of unvaccinated Americans to accept the shot.”
The Western Journal reached out to The Guardian for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
When Trump was in charge, he was the evil perpetrator of any increase in coronavirus cases, according to the establishment media.
In Biden’s case, he is the hero who is trying to save America from the evil virus.
Never mind the fact that the vaccines were developed under Trump, as was the entire plan for distribution that the Biden administration was given to work with. To the establishment media, everything the orange man did was bad.
This is not to argue that the establishment media ought to create a panic over the record number of cases on Tuesday. The death rate for COVID-19 is now low, and there is not a huge reason for alarm about rising case numbers.
But if the establishment media gave fair coverage to both sides, they would be screaming about the sky falling and blaming it on Biden.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
