There’s No Double Standard Between Media Coverage of Obama’s Birthday Bash and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally

Conservatives have accused the mainstream media of a double standard in how they covered former President Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash and the Lollapalooza music festival versus the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, amid fears of possible super-spreader events as the Delta variant surges in the United States.

This criticism is wrong.

Obama’s birthday party on Saturday, held both outdoors and in a tent at his home in Martha’s Vineyard, required guests – the number of which was scaled back to close family and friends following outcry over the initial reported figure of 475 – to submit a negative PCR test beforehand and follow CDC guidelines during. There was a Covid safety coordinator on site. Dukes County, where Martha’s Vineyard is, has 87 percent of its residents fully vaccinated, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Therefore, despite an increase in Covid cases in Dukes County, the risk of getting Covid at the event was low — for the vaccinated and even the unvaccinated.

Lollapalooza, in Chicago, required attendees to prove that they were fully vaccinated or received a negative Covid test result within 72 hours of attending the outdoor music festival, which was held from July 29 to August 1. Those unvaccinated were required to wear a mask on site. More than 52 percent of Chicago residents have been vaccinated, according to the city’s department of public health. Thus far, we know Lollapalooza was not a super-spreader event — as Jim Geraghty, of the conservative National Review, explained in his newsletter on Monday.

On the other hand, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota had no coronavirus protocols, rather just Covid-19 self-test kits, hand sanitizing stations, face masks and available doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine. The county where Sturgis is held has just 46 percent of its population fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. While the festival, which started on Friday and ends on Aug. 15, is mostly outdoors, there are times people are at bars and other indoor places where the risk of spread among the unvaccinated is high.

Context is key, particularly when assessing the risk of events becoming super-spreaders. Granted, one could argue that there is an ulterior motive in the media focus on Sturgis as opposed to the countless events nationwide in places where the risk of transmission is high: after all, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem is a potential 2024 candidate. Putting the obvious bias of the mainstream media aside, it remains the case that it is a false equivalency to compare the Covid danger of Sturgis to that of Obama’s birthday party or Lollapalooza.

The data and science speak volumes, and have been reflected accurately in media coverage of these events. Media bias is a real problem. But coverage of these events is not an example of it.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.