Nation watching, judging state’s COVID numbers
If you’re going to sum up the way national media are covering the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona, it boils down to this: What in the world is going on out there?
Of course, not every publication is that polite in the way it frames its stories. The Daily Beast published a story on Wednesday, July 8 with the headline, “Arizona is awash in COVID-19 and testing is a (expletive) show.”
That’s certainly getting to the point. The same day the New York Times published a story with the following headline: “Arizona is #1, Bahrain is #4.”
These weren’t soccer standings, as the first paragraph makes clear.
“There is no country in the world where confirmed coronavirus cases are growing as rapidly as they are in Arizona, Florida or South Carolina,” it reads. “The Sun Belt has become the global virus capital.”
Why national media are hammering Arizona
Welcome to the Grand Canyon State. It’s a nice place to visit. Just keep to yourself for a couple of weeks when you get back home. (In some states that’s required.)
Numbers are up — way up. Masks are kinda sorta required, maybe. Depends on who you ask. Want to eat in a restaurant? Seems dumb right now, but if you really want to, we have a seat by the window.
Of course, the pandemic has touched every state, every country. New York was in the news a lot early on. Remember that? Seems like a long time ago. Florida and Texas still show up a lot, because their numbers are also up.
But this is our moment, and it’s not a good one. What state was the subject of much discussion at Wednesday’s federal coronavirus task force briefing?
Why us? Why now?
Well, major national publications and networks certainly wouldn’t pay so much attention to Arizona if things weren’t so much worse here than in other places. So you get stories like this, which appeared in Vox.com Wednesday: “The US is struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus in the South and West. But the severity of Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak is in a league of its own.”
Lucky us.
Here’s why ‘this time it’s no joke’
Arizonans have always been an ornery bunch, suspicious of outsiders’ judgment. It’s an independent streak, or maybe what Gov. Doug Ducey called a “pioneering spirit” when saying he trusted the people of the state to make good decisions about wearing masks and social distancing. That he made this remark at a briefing in which he was begging Arizonans to try to stem the tide of a surge that occurred after he had reopened the state made it a little less convincing.
Still, no one wants to be portrayed as doing the wrong thing. (Title of the Washington Post’s “Big Idea” podcast on June 26: “Blunders by Arizona’s governor turned his state into the new ground zero for covid-19.”)
And does it matter, anyway? Yeah, it does. This isn’t Jon Stewart calling Arizona “the meth lab of democracy” on “The Daily Show.” This is different. This time it’s no joke, although you might argue we’re still being used as a punchline.
This is the portrayal of a state in crisis and the story of what it does to fight it. You don’t want to serve as the example of what not to do for the rest of the country. Sure, some people probably relish the portrayal as another example of the leftist media conspiracy that’s ruining everything good about the world, or however, the theory goes these days. But there’s another way of looking at it: sometimes an extra pair of eyes on a problem helps you find solutions. Maybe they see things we don’t.
Arizona, get used to the spotlight
Whatever the case, the headline of this New York Times story on July 3 probably didn’t make many of those pioneering