Tea at Trianon: The Media and the Coronavirus

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 20, 2020

The Media and the Coronavirus

From American Thinker:

The mainstream media are disgusting. That sentence could open every article about the mainstream media in a time of coronavirus. The media's hostility to Trump is so extreme that there is no lie they won't tell to damage him — never mind that doing so might destroy the American economy or cause other unimaginable harm to the American people.

In addition to lies, the media's other line of attack is to call everything Trump says or does "racist." When it comes to the coronavirus, the media have a friend in the Chinese Communist Party that started this epidemic. The communists would also like Trump to be "racist," because attacking him deflects attention from the party's disgraceful and deadly behavior in hiding the coronavirus from the world to keep the Chinese government looking good.

This anti-Trump bias had led to the latest media meme, which is that the phrases "Wuhan Virus" and "Chinese Virus" are racist. Naturally, Trump doubled down, for he now speaks only of the Chinese Virus. The problem for the media is that they, just a month ago, used the words "Chinese" and "Wuhan" nonstop when referring to the virus. Reporters, therefore, know they're on shaky ground when attacking Trump on this point. (Read more.)

From Crux Now:

Amid the scramble to find a cure for the coronavirus and, in the meantime, to enforce restrictive measures to try to slow down its expansion, there’s been relatively little attention to the underlying factors which may explain why some places have been harder hit, more quickly, than others. One emerging hypothesis, however, is that there may be a correlation between declining fertility rates and rapidly rising elderly populations in many societies around the world, and the extent to which those societies have been impacted by the coronavirus. For the Catholic Church, which has sounded alarms about declining fertility for decades, the situation could offer a grim confirmation of its diagnosis that a rapidly aging society places its future in jeopardy - though no one’s likely to celebrate that it’s required a global pandemic which, to date, has claimed more than 7,000 lives, to put the issue back on the table. (Read more.)