The entire "above the fold" space is devoted to Covid19

From Did mainstream media just make a decision to downplay the protests? Was there some poll? Did the ratings come in? by Ann Althouse.

Ms. Althouse is one of the legion of academics, Classical Liberals to the core, who have been caught back-footed by reemergence of fanaticism, intolerance, authoritarianism, anarchism, etc. on the left. She is enjoyable to read, from my perspective, primarily because of her focus on language. She is very attuned to linguistic nuance.

In this post she is commenting on a phenomenon which those in the center and on the right have been discussing for some time.

When the BLM riots began, it was as if there were a spigot and all news of Covid-19 seemingly disappeared from the mainstream media. You could find some reporting but you had to look hard. First everything was civilizational collapse due to Covid-19. Until it wasn't. Then, everything was race, all the time, everywhere.

Everyone acknowledged that new news of course warrants focus. But exclusive focus?

The speculation was that with the sharp contrast at that time of successful Covid-19 outcomes in Texas, Florida, Georgia, against all media expectations and compared to disasters like New York, drove the media away from Covid-19 to civil unrest as a narrative more beneficial to DNC candidates.

A plausible argument. It fits the facts. But like most things, there were probably other factors beyond mere blind partisanship. Blanket coverage of Cassandra Covid-19 forecasts and lamentations was almost certainly causing a drop in click-throughs, the life-blood of media companies.

What was striking to me at that time, about a month ago, was more that the transition was so swift. One day 100% Covid-19 and the next 100% race riots.

And that lasted about a month. And either the clicks are drying up or the news is not polling well for the DNC. Depends on your filter. This has been brewing for at least a week, but I had not quite noticed the tipping point Althouse points out. What I had noticed was the reemergence of articles focused entirely on reported infections.

This was predicted by the center and right leaning pundits more than a month ago as testing finally kicked in to an industrial phase. Not dozens a day but thousands and tens of thousands of tests a day.

From a purely epistemic perspective, there were all sorts of discussions about just what exactly the increased testing might tell us and how it might change policy decisions. But virtually everyone agreed that there would be a period where accelerating testing would cause an accelerated increase in reported cases. Not because the disease was spreading faster but because we were looking harder and more comprehensively.

Everyone knew that the mainstream media would run with reported infections as the story most likely deleterious to their boogeyman, Trump.

And that is what I noticed about a week or ten days ago. More such stories focusing on rising reported infections and very few addressing the more substantive issue of hospital admissions, ICU bed usage for Covid-19 and most critically, deaths.

It has been a week of cognitive dissonance because the tidal wave of reporting indicates rapidly rising infection rates and yet all the data sources seem to be indicating a continued steady decline in deaths. Which is it? Are we entering a new phase of disaster or are we seeing the same pattern we see in other countries, peak deaths a couple of months ago and a slow decline since then?

The mainstream media makes you work very hard to get to something that might at least smell like the truth.

Althouse focuses less on the issue of measurement misreporting and focuses more on the phenomenal phase transition from 100% riots to 100% Covid-19 disaster in the space, again, of a day.

Did the events in Madison, Wisconsin — with the toppling of a statue to the abstraction of progress and a statute of an antislavery hero — suddenly wake everyone up to the downside of encouraging chaos?

I'm looking at The NYT and The Washington Post, and all the top stories are about Covid19 — the big story that the protests had overcome and submerged. Covid is back with a vengeance.

On the WaPo home page, the "above the fold" area is full of Covid19 headlines. Then there are a few things about the 2020 elections, something about Michael Flynn, something about the Palestinians, and — this is the closest we get to the protests — the defeat of Tim Scott's police reform bill. Scrolling past the top screen, there's "Trump lashes out at Black Lives Matter in two tweets/The president accused one of the movement’s members of treason and lamented alleged plans for a new mural in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan that honors the cause" and "Blackface has long been an issue in comedy/Look no further than SNL" — both racial but still not about whatever protests/riots might be happening. Scrolling further, I'm reading many many headlines, but nothing about the protests. Finally, near the bottom, in tiny print, I see "Perspective/Toppling more statues isn’t working when there’s other work to be done." That's all there is right now, I believe.

On the NYT home page, the entire "above the fold" space is devoted to Covid19. After that, there is one protest-related story — "How the Philadelphia Police Tear-Gassed Trapped Protesters" — but it's focused on police tactics and grouped with a couple other stories about police tactics that happened outside of the protests. There's also a set of 3 headlines about "The Debate on Statues." That's the sober issue of whether they should they be removed, not the exciting drama of a mob tearing them down in the night. There are 11 headlines for opinion columns, and only one is at all related to the protests (and not even directly — "We Know How George Flynn Died"). Again, it's about the police. Further down, there's stuff about Louisa May Alcott and Leo Tolstoy and Biden's VP. There's nothing about what's going on in any "autonomous zones" or where anybody marched or rioted.

I really think a big decision was made to stop talking about it! I'm just going to guess: Word got around that the ongoing protests were hurting Democratic Party candidates.

Well, maybe.

I have an instinctive dislike for pat and conspiratorial answers. Conspiracies can work, but very, very rarely. Accidental coincidence of shared interests between Social Justice infatuated journalists and street radicals? Sure. Humans keeping consequential secrets? That rarely seems to me to be a strong attribute of the species.

I fall back on my clicks explanation. They switched because the riot misreporting was driving fewer clicks. As to why it happens in the space of 24 hours across a large industry with many players? I don't know. Concerted coordination is plausible, I just don't think likely. But a lot of things I would have thought plausible but unlikely have turned out to be true in the past couple of years.