Reflections On 155 Episodes Of Pritzker Daily Pandemic Spin Show

CHICAGO — After 155 coronavirus afternoons, Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Friday gave his final daily pandemic news performance of 2020.

Now that the governor has given Illinoisans an early holiday gift of freedom from his smug spin show, let's reflect on nine months of being spoon-fed pseudoscience-driven, politics-filtered public policy that never successfully contained the spread of COVID-19 and severely crippled local economies in Illinois.

On Friday, Pritzker relied on one of his favorite pandemic show wag-the-dog strategies. He had his highly paid spin machine whip up a phony statistic to brag about, ending the daily news conference run on a high note.

"Illinois is America's sixth largest state," the governor said as a prelude to announcing he led the nation's largest housing and small-business assistance program.

Why is Pritzker proud of that detail when more than 60 percent of mom-and-pop retail stores shut down this year, and forecasters say more than 130,000 Illinoisans will be behind on their mortgages by the end of the year?

The governor did not say.

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Offering a misleading tidbit of data was just one of a plethora of go-to spin techniques Pritzker routinely relied on during his daily pandemic livestream. And blaming President Donald Trump was among the governor's favorites.

Delivering public rebukes of the president and recapping occasional Twitter wars with Trump at daily news conferences was the stuff that often landed Pritzker as a guest on Sunday morning network TV.

Pritzker's national attention-seeking behavior started early in the pandemic. The governor heaped all the blame for the state's personal protective gear shortage on Trump without mentioning that his administration hadn't replenished stockpiles in 2019 — and denied public record requests for pre-pandemic protective gear invoices and accounting as if it was a wartime secret.

Ironically, after a while, Pritzker's partisan pandemic propaganda even took on a Trump-like tone.

The governor regularly exaggerated his successes, made promises he didn't keep, berated political foes, dodged questions about his missteps and pandered to lapdog reporters just like the president he loves to hate.

MORE ON PATCH: Gov. J.B. Pritzker Is Doing His Best Donald Trump Impression Now

In early April, even casual watchers of pandemic afternoons with Pritzker could see that he wanted to be renowned as a leader who promotes policies "guided by science and data," a phrase he repeated until it got stuck in your head like the chorus of an annoying '80s song.

At daily news conferences, Pritzker pointed to coronavirus metrics — most importantly, COVID-19 test positivity rates — as proof that his pandemic policies were guided by science.

From his televised bully pulpit, Pritzker accused folks who found discrepancies in state data of being tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists loyal to Trump. As things turned out, a renowned epidemiologist advising Pritzker's administration said the positivity rate, and basically all the metrics the state put forth, "are not scientifically founded."

Amid a coronavirus case resurgence in October, restaurant industry officials raised "serious concerns over the consistency of the data the state is using to drive these devastating decisions to close our industry."

MORE ON PATCH: Coronavirus Surge: Gov's Pseudoscience Creates Credibility Crisis

Despite facing harsh criticism, Pritzker last week rejected the idea that announcing new metrics and abandoning them within a couple of weeks has cost him credibility with the public.

In his penultimate performance, a reporter asked the governor, "If you're not following the metrics and the science that you all laid out publicly, does that give people more reason to be skeptical?"

Pritzker replied smugly: "No, they should know that we’re following the science."

He explained a "whole raft" of medical experts had advised against following the metrics for easing Tier 3 mitigations his administration imposed ahead of Thanksgiving — making reasonable folks wonder which medical experts advised him to establish statistical thresholds for restriction rollbacks in the first place.

The next day he announced statewide social distance restrictions would remain in place until January, at least, regardless of lower positivity and hospitalization rates in some regions.

Promises, Politics And Spin

Another common theme during "155 Pandemic Afternoons With J.B." was that, thanks to Pritzker, our state's coronavirus crisis response was a statistical winner compared with other states.

I lost count of how many times the governor mentioned at his afternoon pandemic chats that Illinois led the nation in per capital COVID-19 testing. But he did it a lot.

It definitely happened more times than he mentioned the alleged testing victory turned out to be a meaningless feat, since experts will tell you that our state — like most states — has never tested enough people to truly understand the extent of coronavirus's spread. One statistic Pritzker is never quick to mention: Illinois ranked No. 10 in coronavirus deaths and No. 12 in cases per capita among U.S. states and territories, according to a New York Times analysis.

If you watched closely, you also probably picked up on another running theme of the governor's daily pandemic livestream: Pritzker promised solutions regardless of whether he could pull them off.

For instance, when pandemic statistics first showed minority enclaves had been hit the hardest by COVID-19, Pritzker rushed to announce a quick fix for low testing in poor, Black Chicago neighborhoods. The plan didn't work. Ultimately, community health centers in Black neighborhoods lacking access to hospitals had to turn people away from local testing sites they were promised.

MORE ON PATCH: Emails, Secret Report Show Politics Of Science Guiding Pritzker

And later, I got hold of emails that showed a University of Illinois professor warned Pritzker's administration against rushing the testing rollout. "Pushing out a garbage test for community testing just to say we are testing would be dangerous," before they promised the garbage testing they didn't deliver anyway.

State Rep. LaShawn Ford put it best. "How can the governor say we're bending the curve when they're not testing an entire segment of the population? It's false narrative," he said.

MORE ON PATCH: Pritzker Breaks Coronavirus Test Promise To Black Community

On May 18, Pritzker's afternoon pandemic update came with another big promise — the same robust, statewide contact tracing effort that successfully pushed declines in coronavirus positivity rates in Massachusetts and New York.

Five months and millions of dollars later, the governor's highly touted effort was proven to be too little, too late. Illinois has about 10 percent of the contact tracers it needs. When asked about that as cases spiked in October, Pritzker deflected blame for the ineffective contact tracing effort — on county health departments and Illinoisans who didn't answer calls from virus hunters.

In the lead-up to the November presidential election, Pritzker's pandemic news availabilities became daily opportunities to dole out political tongue lashings. Headlines from Pritzker pandemic show became more about politics and less about the pandemic.

During his afternoon coronavirus chat with reporters on Oct. 19, the governor doubled down on his unfounded assertion he made on CNN that Trump's Republican allies were to blame for spiking coronavirus cases in the blue state of Illinois. It was quite the show.

With President-elect Joe Biden's victory confirmed by the Electoral College — and no political points to be won by kicking lame duck Trump — Pritzker wants us to believe it was his idea to ditch daily coronavirus updates.

What's closer to the truth is many folks had grown weary of the governor's tiresome afternoon coronavirus updates that lately seemed to be more about the Pritzker than the pandemic.

It became clear that Pritzker had outlived his usefulness as a daily coronavirus crisis resource on Tuesday. TV stations didn't even bother to interrupt previously scheduled programming for his daily coronavirus talk on the first health care workers to receive COVID-19 vaccines injections in Illinois.

And that turned out to be good news judgment. The governor inexplicably commandeered the 2:30 p.m. time slot reserved for coronavirus news to blame voters who rejected his proposed income tax increase during an economic crippling recession for forcing his spendthrift administration to tighten its belt to the tune of $700 million in budget cuts.

He even bashed Republicans for not forwarding suggestions on how to slash spending in his budget, which banked on a federal bailout that didn't happen and his misguided overconfidence voters would support a "fair" tax increase as the state economy exponentially tanked under coronavirus policies that slowed the virus's spread about as well as states with far fewer restrictions.

After so many daily pandemic updates, it was the most glaring example of an easy-to-identify commonality in the governor's spin on, well, most things.

Pritzker thinks he's always right, everybody else is an idiot, and nothing is his fault.

Nobody wants to watch that every day.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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