The governor of Michigan told Chuck Todd this morning that Michigan has the 3rd highest number of coronavirus cases in the country (IIRC). I honestly don't remember the percentage she cited, but she said it was all out of proportion to the population size of Michigan, so the per capita case count is very high. I'd heard about Detroit's case load (once), but not about the rest of the state.This is the thing! There’s nobody going to to these. It’s a couple hundred at people *at most* at these rallies in states of millions. https://t.co/755PWaS7Br— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) April 18, 2020
But I've heard several times about the handful of protestors (one account said "thousands" were there. As if.). I've also heard, on an almost daily basis, about the number of cases and death count in NYC. As was noted earlier and not first by me, the cases and deaths were not really covered by the media until they hit NYC; the west coast was pretty much ignored, and still is. Andrew Cuomo is considered "Presidential" because he gets the majority of the national press coverage, not because he's suddenly JFK or Obama. As I know I said once, similar to the insistence once upon a time that Chris Christie was a shoe-in for the GOP Presidential nomination because he made the East coast press swoon. "Bridge-gate" didn't ruin Christie's political career, reality did. Beyond New Jersey/New York, nobody knew who he was or cared.
Media narratives can be fucking deadly. Today the narrative is becoming "Trump wants the authority but not the responsibility." Even Chuck Todd acknowledges Trump wants the governors to take the blame for what happens next, while he gets the credit for what goes right. Of course, Trump has "governed" that way since day one; but now that truth is the media narrative, and it can be spoken aloud by "responsible" journalists like Todd.
The media narrative cannot become "thousands of protestors" are changing the response to public health and safety measures. The most rebellious act I see is people not wearing masks at the grocery store, and I just avoid them like the plague. The protestors are completely artificial and a minority of a minority. They should be regarded as the whiny children they are, not as a harbinger of the "working class" who will "rise up" and kill us all in our sleep (which is really where that narrative is rooted: fear of the underclass getting wise to their subjugation).
Just becasue a handful of people are on the streets, doesn't mean they speak for anyone else.
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