NBC was on the story, too: “Conservative activist family behind ‘grassroots’ anti-quarantine Facebook events: A family-run network of pro-gun groups is behind five of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to protesting shelter-in-place restrictions.” The takeaway was clear: rather than these protests reflecting the desire of real people to leave their homes for the first time in over a month, protests, to the media’s telling, were just a collection “of fringe activists and ardent Trump supporters.”
Stories like this (and there were many) from NBC make one wonder what today’s legacy media would’ve said about the American Revolution. Would that pursuit of freedom have gotten the same scare quotes: “Armed militia members, other protesters demand ‘freedom’ from Michigan Gov. Whitmer’s stay-home order”
Maybe protestors should be kicked out of hospitals if they get sick, so life-saving ventilators can be reassigned? The Philadelphia Inquirer asked and answered in what was billed as a straight-news piece, titled “Should coronavirus lock down protesters waive their medical care? Some medical ethicists think so.”
Despite this, liberal outlet The Nation went even further, alleging that the legacy press was in fact critical of lockdowns in a piece titled “The Press Is Amplifying a Dangerous Know-Nothing Ideology: The anti-lockdown protests aren’t the first time the media has been swindled into cheerleading an extremist faux libertarianism.” Merely talking about the protests, apparently, was a bridge too far. Repeating a now-common refrain, the outlet lamented that “While the absolute numbers involved in the protests are tiny, their effect—when amplified by the credulous, cheerleading tone of the coverage—is massive and dangerous.” As ever for the media, protesters weren’t just wrong, but evil.
This was all until protests were about something far more important to the legacy press than the separation of powers or individual freedom: racial justice. You probably don’t need much of a reminder how the press vouched for these lockdown-busting protests, but just in case:
Read the whole thing.