More than 160 million Americans have been urged to stay home in what the World Health Organization has declared a global pandemic. Nonessential businesses and schools in states like New York, Illinois and California have shuttered. In parts of the country, coronavirus patients are flooding hospitals.
Yet listeners of Mark Levin’s syndicated radio program heard on March 16 that much of the furor is a politically motivated overreaction. “I don’t want to be part of the hype machine,” Levin said. One of the country’s most-listened-to talk radio hosts, Levin averages 11 million listeners a week, according to the trade publication Talkers. “People on TV who lied to you about Russia and the Ukraine and so forth, trashing the president, using this as another opportunity to hype and dramatize their agenda.”
Levin, a prominent conservative commentator, called the virus a “serious” matter. But he also emphasized that the death toll from the “Wuhan coronavirus” was significantly lower than that from the seasonal flu in the U.S. “We have 30,000 deaths this flu season,” he said, according to a ProPublica review of broadcasts since March 10. Continue reading.