Yeah, I mean "if it bleeds it leads" has been around journalism forever, and it didn't have anything to do with party politics.
Did the media over-react to the first legitimate global pandemic in our lifetimes? No. You could argue the MSM was late to the party. Once the bodies started piling up, the fringes were torn between conspiracy theories: total hoax or Chinese terrorism?
I'm guessing if a talking head on CNN had predicted half a million dead Americans last March, most of us would have considered that needlessly alarmist.
Did someone actually say other countries didn't make such a big deal about COVID? That's simply not true. Many made a much bigger deal about it. And even with the alarmist media, only now are we realizing COVID was likely much worse than we thought. Mexico has admitted the real fatalities are probably twice what's currently reported. Russia has likely under-reported fatalities by a factor of 4. I see no possible way that China's numbers are correct.
Strict lockdowns worked. Relaxed mandates spurred surges. Except in places where they didn't. Counties like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria should have been nightmares, but have remained relatively unscathed. There's still a lot to learn, a lot we don't know. The media reports that there's a lot we don't know, and some people don't like that.
Politically, my understanding is that as soon as Joe Biden was elected, COVID would magically disappear from the news because Democrats had been over-inflating it to undermine Trump. That really hasn't been the case, even with good vaccine news and improving numbers. I see the same call for caution along with potentially troubling developments. The liberal media hasn't exactly sheltered Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo — they've been taking direct hits every night.
Outside of speculation, what has the media gotten factually wrong -- repeatedly wrong -- about the pandemic?