Brit Hume says President Trump got “rolled” on debt deal with Democrats.

POTUS may think using the Covid 19 briefing to read a long list of names of private sector people who are helping in the disease fight is interesting. It’s not.

— Brit Hume (@brithume) April 14, 2020

I’ve been observing that attitude on the part of U.S. press figures for most of my adult life. I’ve always thought it was among the most corrosive features of our media. In American journalism, “the news” consists of four things: crime, violence, disasters, and the activities of government. However fitting it may be to group those items together, they leave out the activities of 85% of our people: the ones who work for corporations. On most days, “the news” is about government, and the government’s various celebrities.

Odds are, the first time you hear about some new miracle drug, the “news” will be about the FDA approving it. Most times there won’t even be a mention of the company that researched it, perfected it, and shepherded it through years of trials and tests. It would be fine with journalists if the public came to believe that new drugs come from the FDA. And that would be fine with me if so many people didn’t believe that new drugs do come from the FDA.

Unless you’re reading the financial press, the only time you’ll hear about American companies in our media is when they lay people off, go bankrupt, or get caught up in corruption. The rest of the time, our “professional journalists” treat private enterprise as a wart on the side of the government, a scourge to be tolerated when necessary, but mostly ignored.

I don’t know where this attitude comes from, but I believe that decades of it have produced a nation where half the people think that corporations are evil monsters that need to be abolished. Politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren prey upon these people and lead them toward Socialism. Successfully.

Two of my favorite things about the Trump Administration are its attitude toward federalism, and the way it embraces and highlights American business as an important and useful part of our lives. If you think about it, these are very unusual features in a modern Presidential Administration. They are so unusual that we observe the spectacle every day of “journalists” at the coronavirus task force briefings insisting that every issue is a federal issue, that every RN in Junction Switch or Cripple Creek who doesn’t have a mask is an urgent matter for the President of the United States.

And now this. In a matter of weeks we’ve gone from having a government agency testing 1,000 patients per day in its little lab in Atlanta, to a nationwide machine that tests 150,000 patients per day. Here’s a company — Abbott — that just shipped out one million of a new antibody test that didn’t exist two weeks ago. They’ll be manufacturing 20 million of them next month. Trump likes to publicly thank people who perform heroics like this. Brit Hume’s reaction? Booooring.