Subway riders in NYC require the closing of South Dakota

I have long made the argument that some portion of so-called polarization is a function of the bulk of our mainstream media being located in three or four cities and dominated by their presence in New York City. Their daily experience is of density, and variety, and corruption, and inequality, and segregation (class or race), and dominant secularism, and hard left governance, etc. What reporters and editors experience as normal is highly abnormal for the rest of the US.

This article provides a striking test of that proposition. Needlessly antagonistic, but to the point. From If Half the Country's COVID Deaths Were in Montana, Would New York Shut Down?by Dennis Prager. I am not a reopen absolutist. It is clear to me that within the US we have multiple curve lines for the Covid-19 spread which vary in time and absolute numbers but seem to follow the same shape. It seems that our hospital systems have much more capacity for the curves as they have manifested than our models suggested.

We need to reopen. How and when is an empirical question, handicapped by the fact that we do not have good data and we do not have good models. We have to make consequential decisions with less confidence than we are accustomed to and some of those decisions are certainly going to end up having been wrong.

But if every state and region has its own distinct covid curve, and own distinct contextual circumstances, then of course, under a federal system with most decision-making at the state and local level, we are going to have a lot of variance in circumstance, variance in policy decision-making, and variance in outcomes.

And, absent the overwhelming of the health system, which at this point seems less likely, then the number of deaths seems like it may not differ all that much across the different states and regions. The timing might vary, the probabilities for particular individuals might vary, and there possibly might be some variance among different demographic groups, but the overall number seems likely to be the same. In other words, much of our effort to flatten the curve, and spare the health system, simply moves deaths into the future, it doesn't reduce the overall deaths from Covid-19.

My state, Georgia, along with Tennessee and Colorado, have announced pretty aggressive reopening plans. Over the next month, we likely will see at least some spike in cases and deaths but perhaps not as many as some news reporting suggest. And overall, it seems unlikely that we will have an excess of deaths over and above what we would expect with our current policies. We'll see.

Prager is making a somewhat different point. He is speculating that the representation of the dangers of Covid-19 and the assessment of the appropriateness of various policy interventions has been substantially shaped by the distortion effect I am concerned about - that the mainstream media practitioners are cooped up in a small number of highly distinct urban environments which also tend to be pretty distinctively dysfunctional and unrepresentative of the US.

He starts by pointing out that the New York metropolitan area, with some 6% of the nation's population, has so far been responsible for 52% of all Covid-19 deaths (despite Washington state's dramatic head-start.) New York has had Covid-19 deaths of 18,690 against 35,676 COVID-19 deaths for the entire United States. With half the nation's deaths, it is perhaps understandable that the mainstream media, anchored in New York, would have a much different threat assessment and much higher appetite for costly interventions than people virtually anywhere else in the nation.

Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina -- two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people -- had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as "flyover" country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?

It is, of course, possible. But I suspect that anyone with an open mind assumes that New Yorkers would not put up with ruining their economic and social lives and putting tens of millions of people out of work because of coronavirus deaths in North Carolina and Georgia, let alone Montana and Idaho (and, for the record, I would have agreed with them).

Even more telling, the media, which controls American public opinion more than any other institution, including the presidency and Congress -- but not churches and synagogues, which is why they loathe evangelicals, traditional Catholics, faithful Mormons and Orthodox Jews -- would not be as fixated on closing down the country if it were killing far more people in some Southern, Midwestern, Mountain or Western states than in New York City.

Pretty combative way of putting it but also pretty revealing. I don't think he is wrong.

His most striking point is not so much the numbers but in his closing paragraph.

In his latest column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman inadvertently revealed how New York-centric his view of America is. Friedman, like virtually all his colleagues at The New York Times, opposes opening up any state in America at this time. He writes: "Every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask?"

Only a New Yorker would write those two sentences. In the 40 years I have lived in the second-largest city in America, I have never ridden on the subway or any other intraurban train or bus. In fact, it is common for New Yorkers to look at Los Angeles with disdain for our "car culture." Like the vast majority of Americans everywhere outside of New York City, in Los Angeles, most of us get to work, visit family and friends, and go to social and cultural events by car -- currently the life-saving way to travel -- not by bus or subway, the New Yorker way of getting around.

But Friedman is a New Yorker, and because his fellow New Yorkers walk past one another on crowded streets and travel in crammed buses and subway cars, South Dakotans should be denied the ability to make a living.

That is to me a sharp illustration of that urban distortionism from which I believe the mainstream media to suffer and which so poisons our national dialog.