The New York Times published its Sunday front page listing the names and one-line description of 1,000 people who died of COVID-19. The reason for the ghoulish listing is that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus will hit 100,000 total in a matter of hours.
It’s a curious display. Is dying from the coronavirus more important, more tragic, more heartfelt than dying of the flu (60,000 dead)? Or heart disease (half a million dead)? Or lung cancer (135,000 dead)?
You want tragedy and pathos? Why not list the 67,000 deaths from drug overdoses? These are real tragedies. The average age of an overdose victim is about 21.
But no memorial in the New York Times for them. Besides, the Times can’t blame the deaths on Trump.
The newspaper’s main headline decried the “incalculable loss” of life in the country.
“The 1,000 people here reflect just one percent of the toll. None were mere numbers,” it said in a short introduction on the front page, which was entirely covered in text.
The front page of The New York Times for May 24, 2020 pic.twitter.com/d14JhFp4CP
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 24, 2020
This is a political year. And whether the New York Times claims non-biased reporting or not, they are perceived as a political publication.
Perhaps the FEC should consider the Times display as an “in-kind” contribution to the Biden campaign.
Marc Lacey, the paper’s national editor, said, “I wanted something that people would look back on in 100 years to understand the toll of what we’re living through.”
The milestone of 100,000 deaths loomed as US states across the country ease lockdown measures.
Trump critic George Conway couldn’t resist using the New York Times front page to tweak the president for his golf outing.
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) May 23, 2020
Conway and other hysterical anti-Trumpers are making the preposterous claim that Trump is responsible for coronavirus deaths. All of them? Even this one?
But one of the first names on the paper’s earlier editions of the front page, Jordan Driver Haynes, 27, didn’t actually die from the virus. He was murdered, according to local reports.
Haynes’ body was found in a vehicle left in a wooded area off a highway in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the local NBC affiliate reported.
In fact, there may be more coronavirus deaths or many fewer. No one knows. People who died at home without going to a hospital and were never tested aren’t counted while we know for a fact that many coronavirus victims counted as dead probably didn’t die of COVID-19. But the New York Times chose an arbitrary time and arbitrary number to tell the rest of us to mourn.
Frankly, it turns my stomach. Using dead people as a political platform to make a political statement is about as low as it gets. But Democrats have done it before, piling the dead from Hurricane Katrina in front of George Bush’s White House. And every mass shooting in America becomes a political rally against the Second Amendment.
The Times will act the innocent in this matter, but the reality is, they didn’t have to list 1,000 names of coronavirus dead on their front page. Using pity and pathos as a cover, the paper is making as clear a political statement in support of Democratic Party talking points (Trump’s fault) as if they had a megaphone announcing it to the world.
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