The Vietnam thing and our garbage media

In the last 20 hours we have seen a spate of articles from the prestige media comparing American deaths from Covid-19 to American casualties in the Vietnam War, and making much of the factoid that the former now exceed the latter: NPR, The Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, National Geographic. There are many more such stories.

There are a few things that may be said about this phenomenon, including a comment that we put up under a Facebook post promoting one of these stories:

Of course more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese died [in the Vietnam war], and so far [no Vietnamese] are known to have died of the Covid, so from that point of view (equally illogical) it is no big deal! (Stories like this exist only to drive clicks and provoke rage.)

Obviously — so obviously that it ought not have to be said — if the comparative casualties between Covid-19 and the Vietnam war are relevant, as a matter of, you know, reasoning, the American experience is no more relevant than the Vietnamese. In fact, in other contexts, at other moments, our betters in the chattering classes would have denounced an argument like this as “racist” because it ignores the Vietnamese “experience.” Does anybody doubt that?

The fact that publications all over the corporate media world wrote essentially the same story within a couple of hours of each other suggests one of two things: (1) That many different oh-so-“brave” journalists have been waiting for this moment for days now because it provides a handy opportunity, if nonsensical, to connect the Trump administration to one of the great disasters of American policy and to associate Trump’s policy failures to the last century’s most anti-American moment, or (2) this is actually a Democratic Party talking point emailed around to editors a few days ago. We suspect both are true, at least to some extent. Both purposes are shameful in the current moment.

Why does the current moment matter? Because the combination of the pandemic and its direct casualties and the lockdown and its casualties, both human and economic, are driving intense anxiety, itself very destructive. Does anybody doubt that is true? Well, publishing stories that serve no useful purpose other than to make people more anxious — and it is very hard to see any substantive value in these “Covid-19 is worse than Vietnam” stories — is particularly destructive right now.

There was a day when the press did not actively try to make people feel worse during a period of national crisis. If, during the Great Depression, the media had run endless irrelevant stories about policy failure (“More Americans have died from hunger than died during the Spanish flu pandemic!”), our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents would have viewed the publishers as ignoble and unpatriotic. Does anybody doubt that?

So let’s not hear anything more about the nobility of today’s press. They are trying to make you feel worse, which is the last thing you need.