Excerpted from Craig Shirley's
column:
There is nothing abhorred more by the mandarins of the 24-hour news cycle than hope. Reporting must beget more reporting. If not, viewers lose interested and change channels and teleprompter readers like Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow get less face time. Hence, broadcasts of chaos, doom, and gloom must end with a promise of more doom and gloom to follow.
Knowing this, it’s not surprising that they’ve lionized the grim somber predictions of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and condemned the more rosy predictions of President Donald Trump. Maybe that’s why Trump’s 60% approval rating on dealing with the COVID-19 crisis caught the media by surprise. They thought everybody in America thought like everybody in the newsroom.
Many presidents are attacked as being too slow to respond to a crisis. JFK to recognize the Soviet threat. Johnson to anticipate the North Vietnamese. Carter for the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Reagan for Iran Contra. And now Trump is being attacked for not recognizing the threat of coronavirus.
Some things never change. All these presidents were vastly different men, yet some understand the presidency in crisis better than others. Today, as they have continually done in the past, any optimistic timeline put forth by Trump regarding the current crisis is blasted, while the scariest and most destructive forecasts are rewarded.
What the media, yet again, fails to see is what the average American sees everyday. Right now, there are millions of people who are trapped at home with nothing to do but watch their back accounts slowly and painfully dwindle to zero. When they turn on the news and they see pundits calling for 60-day quarantines, it might as well be 60 years. Either way, they see little survival for them or their families.
Trump should defer to the experts and trust their opinions, but he should also keep calling for optimism and hope. He should keep putting forward a more optimistic timeline, if for no other reason than to reassure average Americans that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. That there is someone in this system who is fighting to get them back to work and give them back their lives. Who is making their future a priority, not the past.
Trust the experts, but keep punching Mr. President.
Keep punching.