President Trump spoke to the nation Wednesday night from the Oval Office. His update on the coronavirus was exactly the type of calming, reassuring message that the country needed to hear. (If you missed his address, you can watch it online here.)

Trump announced a 30-day suspension of travel from Europe to keep new cases from entering our shores. He also announced that billions of dollars in aid will be provided to help small businesses recover from financial effects of the outbreak.

As sure as night follows day, virtually every media outlet is attacking the president. And virtually every leading Democrat is trying to exploit the coronavirus challenge to score cheap political points. It’s beyond disgusting!

If people are looking for a villain in all this, they should focus on China, where the outbreak originated, and on the communist party of China, which has lied about the virus since the very beginning.

It knew about the virus as far back as November but didn’t tell anyone. In December and early January, it failed to share vital information about how the virus was spreading. Even now, it has not been forthcoming about what it’s learned.

In the meantime, we’ve discovered that a large share of the medicine and medical face masks we depend on are manufactured in China. We depend on them for too much.

Multiple past American administrations, including the Obama-Biden team, failed to take prudent steps to prevent us from becoming dependent on China for vital materials.

The voice in the wilderness warning of these dangers was none other than Donald Trump. But whenever he’d mention it, he’d get attacked. When Trump took office and started confronting the China problem, the left and the media began attacking him mercilessly and haven’t stopped a single day since.

When he implemented a travel ban on China, they called him a racist. (Now they are calling him xenophobic for suspending travel from Europe.) Last year when he ordered U.S. firms to move operations back to America, the media scoffed. “Who does he think he is?” they said. “A dictator?”

We have a big problem with the communist party of China. We’ve become too dependent on it for vital things. It oppress its people, it lies — and too many American politicians have been sleep-walking through it all.

Coronavirus Exposes Media

Instead of reporting the facts about the coronavirus outbreak, the media are irresponsibly exploiting this public health challenge to try to damage President Trump. While most outlets breathlessly report the number of people infected and killed by the virus, most fail to mention the number of people previously infected by the virus who have recovered with no lasting side effects. More than 50,000 people who have contracted the virus have recovered worldwide.

When Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently said that the death rate for those infected by the virus was not the 2.5% that was previously estimated but “probably closer” to 1%, that should have been good news. But most of the media didn’t report it that way. Instead, the headlines focused on the fact that the virus is deadlier than the seasonal flu. “Trump’s top coronavirus doctor says it’s more lethal than the seasonal flu," blared a Newsweek headline.

The financial media have been just as irresponsible. They should be reminding the public that virus outbreaks don’t last forever. Instead, they’ve been fueling panic by taking today’s dire financial situation and extrapolating it out, as if the health challenge we’re going through right now will never end.

This is the worst kind of media malpractice. I understand the old journalistic saw that "if it bleeds, it leads.” But obfuscating the truth and playing to the public’s sense of panic and fear is beyond irresponsible. It runs the risk of crushing the economy and causing widespread suffering as a result.