The Gotcha Gang Plays The 20/20 Hindsight Game
Can we do ourselves a favour and stop the Gotcha Gang game over Covid-19? You know the one. Where the media and political junkies play 20/20 hindsight games, assigning blame for governments not being ready for the pandemic that swept over us in February?
Go to a press conference by president Donald Trump, in which reporters grill him for why he did nothing in January when there were zero deaths from the virus in the United States. Or, here in Canada, when critics roast prime minister Justin Trudeau for being slow to close the nation’s borders when the population couldn’t even spell Covid.
The media sophistication on the story has ranged from nearly none to absolutely none.They say, “You have blood on your hands” to anyone who fails to meet their 20/20 hindsight. That one scientist here or there who should have been heeded in January. For the media Gotcha Gang, who were totally consumed about Trump Impeachment in January or the downed Ukranian jetliner story in Canada, to now act as though they knew it all back then is rank hypocrisy.
For the sake of the argument, let’s just agree that the pandemic was an exceptional tragedy that almost no one saw, or could imagine, coming. The swiftness of the death count, the placating predictions and the failure of early remediation was going to happen to anyone whether they were Liberals or Republicans or British Conservatives.
That’s the nature of human history. Maybe FDR had an inkling the Japanese were upset about oil embargoes in the 1930s. But neither he nor almost any of the people in power imagined an all-out attack on American soil to destroy the U.S. Navy.
Luckily for FDR the media of the day wasn’t into Gotcha. No one asked him “Why did you have so many battleships tied up together?” They also didn’t act as if they were the story, playing hurt feelings at the press conferences. “Why are you calling it a Japanese attack that will live in infamy?”
The important message was not the mistakes that may have led to Pearl Harbor but what the president did next with the knowledge he’d gained.
Yes, there were enormous mistakes by Trudeau’s government in implicitly trusting the WHO on China’s role, not closing off borders and air travel soon enough. Dr. Theresa Tam has been a relay station for bad information from the Chinese about lockdowns, travel and the “earnest” efforts of the Chinese to solve the virus.
Trump’s administration did close off Chinese air travel but left European travel open too long. The Center For Disease Control botched the testing rollout, costing weeks of delay and obfuscation. Trump’s advisors sandbagged him with changing messages about masks, tests and quarantine. He made it worse ballyragging with the media.
Boris Johnson tried to do herd immunity in Great Britain then retreated. All true.
And yes, the South Koreans and Taiwanese mitigated their losses through aggressive testing and social tracking. New Zealand kept its count low, too. Sweden chose to stay open, and while they will see a relatively high death toll they won’t have destroyed their economy in the process either. We can wish we’d borrowed this or that from their approach, but the horse is out of the barn now.
What matters— and where the partisan media needs to aim its sights— is on what is known now and how it can be used to prevent a second wave in the fall. And to finally have those in authority level with their population that more people are going to die before the crisis ends.
The time for a win/ win solution has sailed. There will be costs. So when people return to work— as they must soon— they should be told that the best efforts at protecting the vulnerable will not be perfect. More will become sick, some will die lousy, lonely deaths. To say nothing of the tens of thousands denied cancer, cardiac or stroke care while hospital beds sat empty.
That’s the price for getting things wrong early. But leadership, as FDR and Churchill proved in much harder times, is about being honest.
Sadly, this is not a message emerging from politicians who are rigid with fear that they be described by the media as having “blood on their hands”. The best example of this is the return of children to school. Statistics show no one under 19 has died of Covid-19 in Canada. Tests show they’re not super-spreaders of the virus. Getting kids back to school should be a no-brainer.
Yet the media indulge the catastrophists in fear mongering. When a condition affecting children popped up in New York City (where else?) causing a few deaths the quarantine freaks grabbed to it like a life preserver. You can understand parents’ fear, especially when much of their leadership and media is selling a clearly disprovable disaster meme. Yet children have always been vulnerable till they developed immunities. The media playing this fear game are the lowest of the low.
So move forward. There will be time for assigning blame later. When that message is sent and received, maybe then the media will take a more responsible approach to harvesting catastrophe for headlines. Although judging by some panic-porn headlines on CBC’s website that might be asking for too much: “Pandemic or not, Canada still faces a climate crisis — and the clock is ticking ift.tt/2T1AYTr #hw #cdnpoli “
This after the coldest spring in recent memory in North America. This will not end well.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of Cap In Hand which is available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca