JEFFREY LORD, FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Journalists Forget Their Own Predictions: Millions of Americans to Die.

Let’s be plain: 100,000 dead Americans from the virus is horrific. Every human life is important.

But there is a curious something missing in all the many stories about the death toll of 100,000. Tim notes this question to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany from Politico and CNN’s Ryan Lizza:

“We’re about to cross the 100,000 dead American [sic] milestone… on Election Day, what does the White House view as the number of dead Americans where you can say that you successfully defeated this pandemic? Is there a number?”

Well now. Thanks for asking Ryan. As a matter of fact your question as to “is there a number?”  has already been answered – by your media colleagues. And no, the pandemic has yet to be “defeated.” But there has been a vivid success on the battlefront, even if the media pretends not to notice. Here are some samples about how many Americans would die according to the media, bold print for emphasis supplied:

From The New York Times on March 13: “As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.”

From The New York Times on March 16: “Sweeping new federal recommendations announced on Monday for Americans to sharply limit their activities appeared to draw on a dire scientific report warning that, without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die.”

From The Washington Post, March 19: “In the worst-case scenario, America is on a trajectory toward 1.1 million deaths.”

From MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, March 24: If Americans go to Easter services: “If that happened on Easter Sunday, just 19 days from now, then in May, you’d have millions of dead people all over the country. Millions,” O’Donnell said on his MSNBC show. “If you have packed churches all over the country, including California, on Easter Sunday, by May there could be a million dead people in California.”

From Andrew Slavitt, Barack Obama’s former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): “Currently experts expect over one million deaths in the U.S. since the virus was not contained & we cannot even test for it.”

From infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm to podcaster Joe Rogan the week of March 12: “We conservatively estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, 96 million cases actually occurring, over 480,000 deaths that can occur over the next three to seven months…”

From CNN: “On State of the Union, Dr. Anthony Fauci tells Brianna Keilar that in a worst-case scenario millions of people in the US could die from the coronavirus.”

From Yahoo: “At the low end of the projection this would mean about 700,000 deaths. At the high end it would mean 1.5 million deaths.” 

In her recent book, Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles wrote, “San Francisco saw ninety-two drug deaths in 2015. There were about seven hundred in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of Covid.”

Also by way of comparison, Covid was yet another chance for the media to dust off the Katrina playback from 2005. As Bryan Preston wrote at Hot Air in November of the following year, “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Years later, DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” But with May of 2020 concluding, this gloomy phase of American history was about to come to end. Get ready, dancing TikTok nurses, it’s soon to be showtime!