The coronavirus, together with the measures chosen to deal with it, has been a disaster for pretty much everybody else, but it has been a godsend to the American media and their long-running anti-Trump “narrative”—which decency, if they had any, might have led them to suspend for the duration of the emergency. Some hope! At last here was an unambiguously bad thing which was happening on Donald Trump’s watch and which ingenuity could and did find a thousand ways to blame on him. Unfortunately for the leaders of this campaign—The New York Times, The Washington Post, cnn, and msnbc—they already wasted so much of whatever credibility was left to them by 2016 in blaming the President for bad things that either never happened (Russian “collusion”) or weren’t quite unequivocally bad (that Ukraine phone call) that, although they no doubt continue to delight the Trump-hating rump who still pay attention to their fake news, they seem to have found it difficult to make much headway against the skepticism of the rest of the public. At the end of March, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers were up, not down. In one poll, 60 percent approved of his handling of the virus response.

I like to think that, at least in part, this was owing to disgust with the media on the part of that section of the public—surely more than 60 percent?—whose principal concerns about the Chinese virus, unlike theirs, go well beyond its effect on