WHO NEEDS FOX NEWS?

Not Trump supporters?

Tuesday night, like most Tuesday nights, I settled in to watch election returns.  To my horror, there were no election returns.  Not, mind you, that I really expected the whole nine yards, with pundits pontificating, or boffins with their sleeves rolled up yelling about what the early returns from Door County told us about the Catholic vote, but I did at least expect that, even in this all-coronavirus all-the-time news cycle, there would at least be the reassuring little box up in the corner showing the percentages,  Nope.  Not even anything in the little cavalcade of minutiae which crawls along the bottom of the screen.  Well, this morning after much too much prowling around news sites, I discovered that all of this was, at least nominally, because there weren’t going to be any returns for a week or so.  Clearly, it’s already become tres gauche to care about who is the president of the United States, though perhaps we have another month or so before giving a damn will become an actual crime.

And, if fortune had smiled on me, I could have gone back to listening to records with only this mild gripe darkening my sunny disposition, but no, I had to pay attention to the coronavirus yakking.  What unfolded before me was a quite extended disquisition about how minorities were disproportionately dying of coronavirus.  Switch as one might from MSNBC to CNN and that’s what you were hearing: minorities are dying in disproportionate numbers from coronavirus.

Now, let’s ask, is this important news?  Yes, it is, and it needs to be reported, though I’m not too sure that I was as surprised as said networks expected that I might be.  What really galls me, though, about the liberal media is that they clearly thought this was yet another opportunity to galvanize the common man into a frenzy which would spread exponentially (no, I don’t feel like saying “go viral” right this minute) and accelerate the momentum of their monomaniacal quest to unseat The Donald.

Put otherwise, these networks actually believe their blarney about how the typical Trump voter is a good-hearted, though disaffected, bloke who has somehow just been misled by the charming Trump into voting for a rogue.  Personally, I’d be surprised that beating on this particular drum will do anything but give the president a five-percent bump in popularity in the next poll. 

Actually, it must be said that said Trump voters would probably be almost as happy if they had learned that coronavirus was disproportionately killing Armenians, or Ruthenians, or any group of people besides themselves, but that it’s killing blacks and Latinos undoubtedly gives them just that extra thrill.

And, really, the statistics they were tossing out weren’t especially well-chosen to prove the point, anyway: fifty percent of coronavirus deaths in Mississippi were Afro-American?  That’s probably not that different demographically from the population of Mississippi, especially if they ever did an honest census there.  Sixty-two percent of New York City coronavirus deaths came from the two boroughs with the highest minority populations?  Now put up what percentage of the city’s population those boroughs represent so we can see whether something meaningful is being presented.  Yeh, I know, it’s teevee, and they don’t have the time to get anything right, even when basically every non-commercial minute in a twenty-four hour day is taken up with coronavirus.  But this wouldn’t take fifteen seconds, and, above all, quit thinking that you can wean the Trump voter off his adulation of the man by pointing out that he and his policies are hurting minorities.